“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lifespan of a Fact (Norton, $17.95), about the way he changes or makes up the facts. D’Agata and David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), are the leaders of a movement that believes the most interesting things to read present fact and fiction in an unstable mix. It’s also supposed to be the most thrilling sort of writing to do, now that ...”

“... his old, dark magic in spite of everything, as Hollywood producers, from Irving Thalberg to David Selznick and Harvey Weinstein, are supposed to have done (or do). We can if we like think especially of Selznick as the model for the producer here, and of Faulkner as the model for the writer. There are plenty of real-life candidates for the director role ...”

“... bombing of 1984; had Gore been president on 9/11 (in this last essay, written by the neo-con David Frum, any pretence to serious history is abandoned in favour of political propaganda masked as satire). No wonder Roberts refers approvingly to Kingsley Amis’s novel Russian Hide-and-Seek, which is set in a Soviet-occupied Britain. So what should the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spooky depths of rural England evoked by novelists like T.F. Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and ...”

“... of ‘the still small voice’. She writes of the latter (they resemble the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich) that they ‘brought the 19th century as close as it could come to silence and the void.’ Hopper, whose paintings are ‘silent’ in a similar way, wrote rather tetchily that ‘the loneliness thing is overdone. It formulates something you ...”

“... This is a valuable account, written by a first-hand reporter, of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s tour with Coriolanus, directed by Terry Hands, to Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Zurich. The company were known to Europe from previous visits, but it was a bold adventure, the bolder for the play chosen. It is far from easy in style, and only too likely to baffle a foreign audience, but if fully understood it is instead likely to channel fierce political passions ...”

“... between ‘Useless Man’, a dirge from Bowery’s trash art noise band Minty, and a rendition of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. What might Bowery have identified with in the latter song? I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair? Or something to do with salacious self-mythology? Sordid details following …He was born in 1961 and grew up in ...”

“... Nevertheless the Israelis have been forbearing: they are willing, in accordance with the Camp David arrangements, to consider allowing autonomy to the West Bank Arabs, and are sorry they refuse to take part in the negotiations. The apparent reasonableness of these arguments cannot conceal the fact that they result from a typical transformation of a ...”

“... he regularly voiced was that at the house we rented in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1963 he had saved David Frost from drowning. In later years I saw him quite seldom, though if he’d seen something you’d done on television he’d generally telephone, ostensibly to congratulate you but actually to congratulate you on having got away with it yet ...”

“... in Venice when El Greco first arrived there.The principal essay in the exhibition catalogue, by David Davies, is concerned to emphasise El Greco’s debt to the Counter-Reformation and to Spain. It explains how his subject-matter reflected the priorities of the Council of Trent – which is true of every artist working for Catholic patrons at that date ...”