“... Smiley, modelled largely on Bingham, that le Carré owed his success.’ (To Bingham, moreover, David Cornwell owed his pen-name, via the French for ‘the square’.) The novelist Bingham liked plots, as might a man who was both a novelist and a runner of agents. He didn’t like the ‘fluffy stuff’ of character-creation. Jago admires him and his ...”

“... ran a tapestry-repair company. The cannibal daughter worked there too. No account of the sculptor David Smith fails to notice his time as a welder on a production line; Bourgeois’s stitching should be thought of in the same way. A skill already learned, waiting to give a flavour of unusual competence to quite different constructions. When, in Seven in a ...”

“... the earlier movie the small masterpiece the new one can’t compete with, is that of Glenn Ford. David Thomson says Ford was ‘ill at ease’ in this film, and the thought makes sense at first, especially if we remember Ford as the beleaguered teacher in Blackboard Jungle or the cop driven wild by grief in The Big Heat. Then we recall his role in Gilda, a ...”

“... losing sales. The new fad is for Toyota’s gas-electric hybrid, the Prius, as driven by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Prius does 60 mpg (a full-size SUV does about 13). According to Newsweek, Toyota expects sales of hybrids to multiply ninefold by 2006. But drivers will still want to sit up there above the crowd. Accommodatingly, Ford has just ...”

“... It’s early evening. The family races home from its daily pursuits: Bart and Lisa from school, on skateboard and bike respectively; Homer in his car from his job at the nuclear plant; Marge in her car with baby Maggie from the supermarket. They all arrive at precisely the same time, and make a dash for the living-room sofa, all five hitting it at precisely the same moment ...”

“... always described in terms of ‘our boys out there’, sons, lads, children, a poor, beleaguered David. That’s us, the eternal victims. And the enemy is always Goliath, even the children who defied the IDF in Rafah three days ago and therefore had to die while demonstrating, empty-handed, in solidarity with the thousands whom the benevolent military had ...”

“... a mile off, and sees through Angier every time, until Angier, with the help of Nikola Tesla, alias David Bowie, discovers a trick that isn’t a trick at all but a bit of new weird science. This is no longer magic according to Borden – a stage magician for him is, in the words of the novel, ‘not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part of a ...”

“... amount of time to get to the boardroom for an important meeting’). The lead characters in David Nicholls’s One Day spend the first twenty pages in bed together categorically refusing to have sex, settling for ‘human closeness’ instead. ‘Let’s just cuddle,’ Emma Morley says. ‘Of course,’ Dexter Mayhew replies, ‘though in truth he had ...”

“... of Etienne-Jules Marey and Lucien Bull, and the popular adventures of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough. In another light Painlevé is a photographic modernist, attending to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street. On ...”

“... who seems to have been both for and against the armistice, expertly and unctuously represented by David Thewlis in his Harry Potter schoolmaster mode, and who appears to Diana as the god himself, levitating, changing forms and throwing thunderbolts. Finally, and this is probably the film’s low point, he abandons all pretence of being anything other than a ...”

“... his prints are mostly posthumous catalogues. Around the end of 1980, Hujar met a young artist, David Wojnarowicz; they were briefly lovers and continued to collaborate on various projects. Hujar photographed Wojnarowicz’s mural paintings at New York’s disused piers, where gay men had found erotic community among the ruins. Wojnarowicz is the subject of ...”

“... that his near neighbours were two of the most socially committed architects of postwar Britain, David and Mary Medd, who lived in a house they designed and built for themselves in the 1950s. The Medds were leading figures in the Hertfordshire county schools programme. Using a prefabricated system, first to build single-storey primary schools and then two ...”

“... after a visit to the Exposition Universelle, he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for David Wilkie, Charles Robert Leslie and Francis Grant – and noted that the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites (the ‘école sèche’) had not inhibited their response to life and sentiment: he cited the Order of Release by Millais as something beyond the ...”

“... signage survives (‘THIS IS A SAFETY HELMET AREA’). It is easy to detect the influence of David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin, or OMA’s Garage Museum in Moscow, where clean and complete restorations were rejected and the damage of history left visible, stitched together with stark, unfussy new additions. But in Battersea this ...”

“... he can get away with anything. This all made me think of another film in which Mortensen appeared, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007), where all the gangsters were Russians. Another title for The Dead Don’t Hurt could be ‘Western Promises’, but this movie is a very late contribution to the genre. Only the worst promises are kept. The familiar ...”