Anything goes in the wacky world of Berlioz’s Faust story. It’s a heaven and hell of a lot better than Gounod’s, but it isn’t an opera, it isn’t an oratorio and it certainly isn’t the gospel according to Goethe. So Terry Gilliam, ENO’s latest wild-card debut director, was right not to play by all of the composer’s already rather warped rules. At first you sigh: not the Nazis and the Holocaust again. But only an oddball visionary like Gilliam is going to come anywhere near the often disorienting musical pictures painted by the most original of Romantics.

Dan Snow's toxic trilogy climaxed in New York, where he crawled voyeuristically through the rotten core of the Big Apple. It was part Discovery Channel documentary, part Gangs of New York dirty realism, as Snow took a frankly indecent relish in regaling us with tales of death, disease and raw capitalism at its baby-eating worst.

Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and which favours quiet pluck over showy heroics. With a narrative shorn almost entirely of incident, its existential, quasi-religious minimalism recalls Waiting for Godot.

I prefer "living room", but I have a friend who insists on "lounge". For some reason that probably goes deep into the psyche, I cringe at "sitting room". Same goes for "front room". As for "reception room", I’ve only ever seen that in the windows of estate agents. "Parlour", too, is a rarity, confined now to TV period dramas, which is exactly where "drawing room" seems to be heading (or perhaps I’m not mixing in the right circles). And anyone who calls it a "dining room" should surely be consigned to lonely TV dinners in perpetuity.

“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found authority and expression in novels the world would have them unfit to read, let alone write. It’s an attractive legend, one that leans over the shoulders of Jane Eyre, of Cathy, Heathcliff and Helen Graham, reflecting their virgin-born passions back with all the greater intensity.

Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll Flanders. Or The Devil's Whore. Though maybe not Five's brothel sitcom, Respectable.

A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of artists grew to inspire ideas not only about soft furnishings and the House Beautiful, but to influence a whole way of life, teaching the aspiring Victorian bohemian how, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “to live up to the beauty of one’s teapot”. And as one might expect, the exhibition is beautifully designed, in a way that suggests you might have stumbled into the secret, scented and darkly cavernous chambers of an aesthete Aladdin.

What a slap in the face for the human predicament that an opera which, for all its faultlines, should carve "love and courage will set you free" on every heart meets with barely a moment of truth in Jürgen Flimm's production. It's the second Covent Garden revival in a month to give no sense of people or place, and like the McVicar Aida, it should have been put quietly to sleep after its first run. "But Nina Stemme will be wonderful," they all said. Don't bank on it; just be thankful that the soprano's Leonore and, perhaps more impressively, Endrik Wottrich as the imprisoned husband she saves are up to the vocal challenges.

What a slap in the face for the human predicament that an opera which, for all its faultlines, should carve "love and courage will set you free" on every heart meets with barely a moment of truth in Jürgen Flimm's production. It's the second Covent Garden revival in a month to give no sense of people or place, and like the McVicar Aida, it should have been put quietly to sleep after its first run. "But Nina Stemme will be wonderful," they all said. Don't bank on it; just be thankful that the soprano's Leonore and, perhaps more impressively, Endrik Wottrich as the imprisoned husband she saves are up to the vocal challenges.

Weeds, memorably, have been described as merely being plants that grow where we don’t want them. Walking through the Wellcome’s fine new exhibition, we can conclude that the “dirt”, too, is merely material appearing out of its appropriate location. One man’s waste is another man’s fertiliser; one civilisation’s dust-heap another’s city foundations. Children first planting a window box learn that “dirt” is alchemy: stick in a seed, out of the dirt comes dinner.