While the end of the nineteenth century is often associated with the rise of objectivity and its ideal of a restrained observer, scientific experiments continued to create emotional, even theatrical, relationships between scientist and his subject. On Flinching focuses on moments in which scientific observers flinched from sudden noises, winced at the sight of an animal's pain or cringed when he was caught looking, as ways to consider a distinctive motif of passionate and gestured looking in the laboratory and beyond. It was not their laboratory machines who these scientific observers most closely resembled, but the self-consciously emotional theatrical audiences of the period. Tiffany Watt-Smith offers close readings of four experiments performed by the naturalist Charles Darwin, the physiologist David Ferrier, the neurologist Henry Head, and the psychologist Arthur Hurst. Bringing together flinching scientific observers with actors and spectators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatre, it places the history of scientific looking in its wider cultural context, arguing that even at the dawn of objectivity the techniques and problems of the stage continued to haunt scientific life. In turn, it suggests that by exploring the ways recoiling, shrinking and wincing becoming paradigmatic spectatorial gestures in this period, we can understand the ways Victorians thought about looking as itself an emotional and gestured performance.

With over 132 practice tips and more than 100 illustrations, reading this guide is like having a personal shooting coach. This huge technical book teaches techniques of professional trap shooting; singles, handicap and double trap.

The journey of a man who loses everything in one terrible moment, from the acclaimed author of A Blade of Grass Leo Millar is a young painter in Paris who seems to have it all—a beautiful French wife, a talented young son, a thriving career. After years spent as a lonely orphan, Leo basks in a sense of belonging, until one dreadful instant robs him of all that he cherishes. Overcome by guilt and despair, he flees to a tiny, rugged island off the coast of Normandy. With its timeless customs and wild natural beauty, the island soon works its magic, and Leo encounters a brilliant but troubled musician who is fighting her own demons. But it is only when a strange, damaged child enters Leo’s life that he has a chance to move beyond his own losses and find, perhaps, a new definition of love and the restoration of hope. This luminous novel transports us to a place of elemental beauty—of stone and salt, of light and shadow, of solitude and community. Here, old promises are kept alive in the heart and given new expression.