You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.

For visitors to New York, it’s all about Manhattan, its 23 square miles of skyscraper-encrusted granite instantly familiar, its many landmarks – enshrined in movies and music – must-sees on the itinerary of first-time tourists. The other four New York City boroughs? Well, the journey to and from the airport takes you through at least one of them, which is as far as many people get to visiting them.

“I want something Russian…” It’s with such a cry that Helen Mirren, bored by the bizarrely transgressive masked ball that comes at the close of the first episode of Catherine the Great, gets the dancing going: nothing from the imported fashions of Europe will do for her, and the music duly strikes up, a soupily romantic melody on violin, the quintessence, you might think, of mythic “Russianness”.

“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement.

Serious historians don’t much care for counter-factual speculations. Readers, however, often enjoy them. So here’s mine. In 1780, the seemingly invincible forces of the East India Company had suffered a crushing defeat at Pollilur, west of Madras. It was inflicted by the well-drilled Mysore armies of Haidar Ali and his legendary warrior son, Tipu Sultan. Backed by French arms and expertise, the Mysore forces had allied with the rulers of Bengal and Avadh (roughly, today’s Uttar Pradesh) to resist the merchants-turned-conquerors from London.

Karl Marlantes’s Deep River is an all-American novel. And why should it not be? Marlantes is an all-American author. He grew up in small-town Oregon, attended Yale (and Oxford), fought and was heavily awarded as a Marine in Vietnam, then settled down to convert his experiences into the well-received Matterhorn and What It Is Like To Go To War.

It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (not least when wearing white cashmere pantaloons) – struggled to make his voice and intelligence heard.  

Ashley Joiner’s expansive documentary Are You Proud? opens with the testament of a redoubtable nonagenarian remembering his experiences as a gay man in World War II.

Many of the women in this pioneering collection of essays have faced unimaginable hardship in their pursuit of truth – persecution by extremist groups as well as the loss of family members and friends. The tone of this collection is, however, best captured by Amira Al Sharif’s photograph of laundry hanging out to dry across a grocer's family home which has been damaged in a coalition bombing in Yemen.

Following a triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ Superstar, now playing at the Barbican, the Park works its magic on another of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Seventies rock operas.