“... 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 ...”

“... is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which ...”

“... as fast as style, and film is a merciless medium. But certain frozen styles have their appeal, and David Hemmings, as Thomas, owner of the Rolls and famous photographer who was in the flophouse collecting images for a book, is as impressively sulky and obtuse as he always was. I don’t think I had noticed previously how distracted he is throughout the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... buoyancy of a gratuitous passing intervention. The ethos might be traced back to the Filipino-born David Medalla, who contributes to the display a sweetly daft 1963 bubble machine and to the catalogue an equally absurd extravaganza of name-dropping. (He meets everyone from James Dean, ‘one of the first people to encourage my art’, to Elias Canetti, ‘the ...”

“... head of the Virgin, and maybe of the child too, in the Adoration: that they are the work of Gerard David. The matter seems beyond any sure adjudication and one would be unwilling to credit the emotional centre of the picture to a hand other than Gossaert’s. Yet it is easy to regret what was lost when he met demands for coarser, more erotic subjects and a ...”

“... the leader of La France Insoumise; Benoît Hamon, the former leader of the Socialist Party; and David Cormand, national secretary of the Green Party.Under pressure, the signatories soon began to cave in. Yannick Jadot of the Green Party discovered he had some issues with the letter. ‘I have never considered there to be state racism in our country,’ he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In some cases the viewer becomes like the figure that stands dwarfed in the foreground of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, which is reproduced in the catalogue alongside Kleist’s reaction to it: ‘It was like someone having their eyelids cut off.’ Even landscape can be painfully revealing. The German connection is important, but if one lists ...”

“... not from photographs. The crumpled faces and sculpted beaks which emerge from the webs of lines in David Levine’s wonderful pen drawings for the New York Review of Books, and his watercolour and pencil heads for the New Yorker, tend to be riffs on existing images. Boxer, in many ways a far less accomplished artist, achieved likeness though a grasp of ...”

“... of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration might look like? Turn to Ingres’s portrait of Amédée-David, Comte de Pastorait – ‘a promising bureaucrat’ under Napoleon who, by 1826, when the portrait was painted, had become Conseiller d’Etat Extraordinaire. His black uniform, brilliantly set off by the red ribbon and white enamel star of the Légion ...”

“... about fashion and its presentation. Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion since 1970 and David LaChapelle’s photographs both run until 23 December. An exhibition at the V&A of Gianni Versace’s clothes runs until 12 January.* All three tangle with the paradoxes of taste and exclusivity. LaChapelle embraces Truman Capote’s ‘Good taste is the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”