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“... sense that the material is being stretched. His first, The Horned Man (2002), a campus novel as David Lynch might have conceived it, was rightly praised: it charted a professor’s descent through paranoia into outright mania in a way that was neat, sharp, witty and intelligent. But it gave the sense of being a brilliant writing-school exercise, rather than ...”

“... recent Clear (2004), a short but bounding novel in which characters theorise about the illusionist David Blaine, are set in London, but Barker’s territory is the hinterlands of the South-East, where literature doesn’t tend to happen – Luton, Canvey Island, the Isle of Sheppey, Ashford (‘gateway to Europe’). Despite the prizes – the Booker ...”

“... since 2003. The repetition and baby-talk have largely cleared up, while some studiedly casual David Foster Wallace-ish ‘so’s and ‘anyway’s have crept in. But there are still the perky pop-cultural asides (‘Amigos, I had my doubts’) along with the unidiomatic, vaguely Yiddishy noises, probably descended from Saul Bellow: ‘I was very ...”

“... print. Dover Books brought out a paperback edition of Lady Audley’s Secret in 1974, and in 1987 David Skilton edited it for the Oxford World’s Classics. In the interim, as Lyn Pykett’s excellent introduction to a new Oxford edition explains, both Braddon and sensation fiction in general experienced a revival as a result of the rise of feminist criticism ...”

“... might no longer want to be where he thought he was going. I don’t know whether Carruth regards David Lynch as an influence, but Lynch’s name kept coming into my mind as I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do ...”

“... book being read, a chapter a day, by people as different as Stephen Fry, Tilda Swinton, even David Cameron, as well as ordinary folk. The Sea Inside is most at ease when, again, he is in the company of whales. Companionable and entertaining, the book follows the recent fashion for combining memoir, travelogue, historical byways, natural history and ...”

“... colour and sharp light, so that the whole thing looks mildly cartoon-like, often resembling, as David Denby says, hyperrealist painting. Or the way we imagined the 1960s when we thought they were still the 1950s. Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg with a fine capacity for recurring surprise, as if he were Clark Kent who kept forgetting he had another ...”

“... The Battle of Cascina, was ordered from Michelangelo, then putting the final touches to his David. Among those involved in the commission was the civil servant and author Niccolò Machiavelli. After a year working on ideas – a cornucopia of sketches survives – and then on a full-size cartoon, Leonardo began painting in the Sala in early ...”

“... After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney assembled a crack team of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a ...”

“... are often but not always wrong. During Hollywood’s great period the good ones (Irving Thalberg, David Selznick, Darryl Zanuck) knew how to protect and indulge creative talent, but they also knew when to cut it off at the pass. One thing is well known to the modern producer: when a writer/director gets into his messianic period, a period born of popular ...”

“... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist laws to freeze the ...”

“... that the lobby had played in the affair. There was also a comment piece by the veteran journalist David Broder, which opened with the words: ‘The Obama administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place.’ Freeman’s critics maintain that his views on Israel were not his only ...”

“... before 1939. And then there was Pollock. He didn’t invent the drip and pour technique (he joined David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in 1936, in which unconventional techniques such as pouring pigment were being investigated) but he certainly made it his own in the works by which we substantially know him. Between 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim ...”

“... the time of writing, the erstwhile Trump-basher Mitt Romney and the classified document leaker David Petraeus were also under consideration for cabinet posts.) I have trouble drumming up fear in my heart for the likes of Kushner, Bannon, Palin or even Bolton, a devil we know from the Bush administration whose bark as ambassador to the United Nations was ...”

“... for a while as live-in curators. In 1970 a new modernist extension was added, by Leslie Martin and David Owers, to show off more of the work in a larger space with more generous sofas. The latest development – funded by £3.65 million from Arts Council England and £2.32 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund – has involved entirely remodelling and ...”