“Not everyone was thrilled by the decision last month to give the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most influential literary award, to The Sea by the Irish novelist John Banville,” begins Sarah Lyall’s NYT profile. At which point anybody who read the Times art section yesterday will mutter, “Well, duh.” The profile’s notable, though, for its concise treatment of the backstage controversies that went into the award, in which the deciding vote was cast by a critic who’d already gone on record as sharply disagreeing with Banville over the literary merits of fellow nominee Ian McEwan’s Saturday.