Yet these details are not entirely to be trusted, and it would be a little simplistic to assume that they prove the distinction between Banville and Black, High Art and Pulp Fiction.

NEWYORKER: Pseudonymously Yours

It is a hardboiled detective story set in an affluent Californian high school where everyone speaks a wonderful mixture of teen slang and 70-year-old pulp lingo.

ECONOMIST: Independent films

It is written in an elegant, clerical hand, on four sheets of parchment, each two feet wide and a bit more than two feet high, about the size of an eighteenth-century newspaper but finer, and made not from the pulp of plants but from the hide of an animal.

NEWYORKER: The Commandments