Dance as an art form doesn’t have a great track record in social and historical commentary. The endless grey areas, not to mention the complicated details, of history really require words to do them justice. Flamenco, of course, has words, but it’s still a highly emotive art form, one you might think unlikely to produce a subtle take on the theme of homeland.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the vilest pencil moustache, and yet the playwright gives him the most memorable line of the whole play. Why? To demonstrate that nobody is too completely good or bad not to be redeemed by beauty.

“The touch is light. We like it so,” wrote Ninette de Valois in one of her later poems. You didn’t know the founder of the Royal Ballet wrote poetry? Don’t worry, you’re not missing much – except the occasional phrase which can serve as an epigraph for early English ballet.

Many successful writers turn to their pens having failed miserably at everything else. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and subject of Sky Atlantic’s new mini-series, spent all of his youth failing, but unlike literary contemporaries Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, failure seems to have been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

For his new band, Pigfoot, trumpeter Chris Batchelor has gathered three virtuosos of British jazz. Between them, pianist Liam Noble, tuba player Oren Marshall and drummer Paul Clarvis have made some of the most original British jazz of the past few decades. In this, Pigfoot’s debut album, they not only blow the cobwebs off eight favourites of the trad repertoire, they sandblast away decades of treacly cliche, revealing music of both immense joy and subversive power.

Read Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you’ll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral compass of all the kids and most of the adults. Gerhard Lamprecht’s early (1931) “talkie”, with a screenplay by Billy Wilder, has darker undertones, much admired by the obsessive 19-year-old Benjamin Britten.

Vivien Leigh deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the mercurial Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, so producer David O. Selznick's legendary Civil War epic has been re-released to coincide with her centenary. It is a tactless choice to have been made, however, at a time when movies are conscientiously addressing the horrors of slavery and the movement to overthrow it.

Beyond being made in the 1930s, being a British production, being a musical and two having the same director, nothing links these four films. But the randomness of this double DVD set brings bucketloads of charm.

Forever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything like that simplistic. Opening at the Young Vic last night, The Scottsboro Boys is no mere barrel of vacuous laughs, though it is comical and buoyant along the way.

We know, not least through her own account, of Marianne Faithfull's colourful progress as winsome Sixties pop star, lover of Mick Jagger, junkie on the streets of Soho and her artistic rebirth as gravel-throated chanteuse. Here, her frequently gruelling trawl through archives from the 1930s and '40s helped to explain how she became the artist she is, while throwing up some morbidly fascinating details about the inner workings of the Third Reich.