1.   An intellectual exercise.

2.   And what initially appears to be only an intellectual exercise winds up exerting a far more visceral power to disturb.

3.   As metaphors are heaped on metaphors and ironies accumulate, the horrors being described are finally put at such a safe remove that the show becomes an intellectual exercise.

4.   A professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Leeds and at Oxford, Tolkien started by fashioning the languages his characters spoke, purely as an intellectual exercise.

5.   But a presidential contest is not an intellectual exercise in economic theory.

6.   But until the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, wholesale tax revision remained an intellectual exercise with no serious prospect of actually becoming law.

7.   Computer games, it seems, are a form of intellectual exercise.

8.   Fifty years later, such if-only-they-had-known speculation is merely an intellectual exercise dealing with a host of unknowable factors.

9.   For all his mastery of gross-out imagery, though, the Canadian writer-director views his work as an ongoing intellectual exercise.

10.   Few intellectual exercises are as tempting as trying to figure out the strategies of these dark characters.