“... so when you arrive at Fra Angelico’s sweetly decorative manuscript illustration of King David you notice that the gesture of the hand must be the result of someone’s careful observation of what a bent wrist and separated fingers can be made to say and how a foot can be made to rest firmly on the ground. It is dated c.1430 – one can imagine a ...”

“... of the country, £7.45). The company is no doubt pleased to recognise itself in the image of what David Cameron described a year ago as ‘socially responsible’ capitalism, and its sales have bucked the recession – turnover and profits increased by 15 per cent in 2011. But using eco-friendly packaging and donating unused food to the homeless is one ...”

“... for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians.’ And along the same lines we may suspect ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

“... photographs of exhausted marines. Set an amateur snapshot by Vanessa Bell, a glamour portrait by David Bailey, and a picture of a nurse in uniform from Belle View Studio in Bradford against one another. One aim the curators had when they settled on this melange – a multi-layered picture of the nation in photographs – is summed up in the title: How We ...”

“... tempted to pick up on this suggestion because it recalls one of the greatest of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), where so-called anger therapy results not only in a welcome release of psychic aggression but in teams of little people smashing in the heads of the people the patient doesn’t like. The real interest of Let the Right One ...”

“... personal essays, not far from the work of the so-called ‘ultra-talk’ poets (Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby) whose chatty, digressive work filled many magazines in the 1990s. Perillo told me at a recent reading that her favourite contemporary poet was C.K. Williams, whose famously long-lined, sometimes violent poems were as committed as she is to ...”

“... with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in question. David Selznick told Wilder that ‘mixing gangsters and comedy wouldn’t work,’ and perhaps even Wilder didn’t know at first how wrong his adviser was. Would the St Valentine’s Day Massacre really play as farce? The opening frames of the film offer an ...”

“... One unfamiliar painting is hard to leave behind. This is the extraordinary picture of King David holding a lira da braccio and looking down on a priest who kneels in prayer before him: a work recognised by Mina Gregori as by Moretto nearly twenty years ago, and which has not been seen in public in Britain for two hundred years. It was once attributed ...”

“... Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of ...”

“... when a change of surface texture – say, between one fabric and another – must be registered. (David would let this French tradition of brushwork be the vehicle for political rather than religious probity.) This is a very different craft from the more energetic kind which makes surfaces in Rubens’s paintings seem more alive than the hair or fur or flesh ...”

“... the system – the leaks, the water shortages and, most pressingly, the sewers. ‘Consider,’ David Kinnersley wrote in his book Troubled Water, just before the giveaway happened, ‘how much enthusiasm there would be for privatisation in Parliament or the City if it were called sewage privatisation. Although everyone refers to water privatisation, the ...”

“... out a simpler diet than we’re used to, an equivalent for rainy, hectic Britain of what Elizabeth David discerned in the Mediterranean diet when she called it ‘the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat’. Except there’s no romantic sense, as there was in David, of a benign landscape supporting people ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... envied the men their licence to experience and capture the look of real action. The photographer David Scherman, her new American chum and lover, from whom she learned a lot, pointed out that she was ‘a perfectly bona fide Yank from Poughkeepsie’ and could herself qualify for such a job; so with Withers’s backing she sought and received accreditation ...”