There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the Trade Union Congress. A seemingly endless parade of indistinguishable middle-aged balding white men, with Barbara Castle’s fiery redhead and Margaret Thatcher’s immovable blonde hairdo the only relief, would grab 15 minutes of fame speechifying on the minutiae of policy, some puffing on pipes, some on full-strength Capstans.

The reporting of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006 – on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, a deranged gift from his loyal security services – is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a full diagnosis of the horrifying corruption and brutality of Russia under his governance.

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. 

Matt Forde gives a warning: “Don’t heckle the disabled – that’s a hate crime.” What an opener for his latest touring show, The End of an Era, which I saw at the Oxford Glee Club. 

To explain: in 2023 the back pain that Forde thought was sciatica turned out to be spinal cancer. Major surgery that included severing nerves in his nether regions followed, and post-surgery he now uses a stoma bag and self-catheterises. Thankfully Forde has recovered.

The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.

It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.

The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.

As Valentine’s Day crests around us, and lonely hearts come out of their winter hibernation, what better time to publish writer and journalist Shon Faye’s second book Love in Exile? In part an examination of her own life, loves, and loss, Faye is exacting and passionate in her dissection of how we, as a society, understand the state of love: an unwieldy term that hides many painful mysterious, and which, too often, is subject to our unquestioning reverence.

In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.