“... painted in France in 1918, has the gawkiness of something noticed, not composed, while in David Cox’s Tour d’Horloge, Rouen it is not so much the architecture of the clock tower as the patch of bright light seen through the arch at its base that is the subject. This kind of observation, centring on light, weather and landscape, became a ...”

“... TV channel Russia Today solicited the views of Annie Machon – ex-MI5 agent, ex-partner of David Shayler and current 9/11-truther – and she came up with a conspiracy theory of her very own: ‘Hardline factions within the American administration,’ she surmised, ‘egged on the FBI to try and get them to come up with this result because of the need ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... dozens of legal scholars, including a great many progressive luminaries like Thomas Buergenthal, David Cole and Burt Neuborne. Other more right-wing figures vouching for Koh include William Taft, the State Department’s senior lawyer in 2003, who provided the Bush-Cheney administration with its legal rationale for invading Iraq, and John Yoo, the ...”

“... in Poets’ Corner is an image of a national bard. Roubiliac’s version was commissioned by David Garrick, who posed for it himself and while this was certainly vain of him, it was not as vain as it would be today. At a time when the play, rather than the biography, was the thing, Garrick was not unjustified in seeing himself as the embodiment of ...”

“... there was an achievement in his resistance. ‘Is this man simply not cut out for the job?’ David Cameron asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Unlike the subject of his biography, Brown has held high office, but he’s a less successful public speaker, he doesn’t have Maxton’s enormous smile and he doesn’t exude either warmth or useful ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... to the underground government facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and ...”

“... because I was given Twin Peaks Season One on DVD for Christmas. For those who’ve never seen David Lynch and Mark Frost’s pioneering TV series of the early 1990s, Twin Peaks is a small town in Washington, five miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the state line. Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen, has been murdered. Agent ...”

“... are. Well, some people do; but they like to keep it secret. According to John Hennessy and David Patterson’s Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (2002), in 2000 Google had 11,000 machines at four sites, two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia. One thing that’s certain is that the farms are growing all the time, as new hardware is ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”

“... France 2 had to fudge their story. Olivier Mazerolle, the director of the channel, resigned; David Pujadas, the news anchorman, was suspended for two weeks: journalists at the station had threatened to strike unless they went. In Lloyd’s account, bizarrely, the scandal of Juppé’s volte face is of interest only to the extent that it provides the ...”

“... of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Initially notorious for eating roadkill and frying up placenta, F-W has established himself as the shaggy-haired, TV-savvy spokesman for organic, locally sourced produce, and the author of much-praised cookery books, the latest of which is a compilation of writings entitled Hugh Fearlessly Eats It All ...”

“... the cabinet in 2008 at the head of the department for energy and climate change. Peter Mandelson, David Miliband, James Purnell and Andy Burnham were other New Labour luminaries who swapped being special advisers for being parliamentarians, all of them, like Balls, dropped into carefully selected safe seats (Balls reveals that he put pressure on his ...”

“... on the horizon.* Indeed, previous research on the topic revealed that, in company with Colonel David K.E. Bruce of the Office of Strategic Services, he was responsible in 1944 for ‘liberating’ the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Master spies come in many guises, and the role of Dubonnet and gin in disabling the chief ideologies of the 20th century ...”