“When I was a small boy growing up in the south of England,” says Frank Turner - pausing just long enough for the anticipated good-natured jeering from the Scottish crowd - “I dreamed of playing the legendary King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.”

In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is somewhat formal but decidedly casual — trousers loose enough to bend in, a striped jumper with the sleeves rolled up, workman-like, and a shirt which looks like it has several top buttons undone.

Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on its (re)publication in English a decade ago was acclaimed as one of the greatest Russian (and not only Russian) novels of the 20th century.

The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,000). British Transport Films was set up a year later, the biggest industrial film unit in the UK.

Most of the facts about the Atlantic slave trade are well known; what is less easily understood is how history can make a person feel today. A question which invites an experimental approach in which you test out emotions on your own body. In 2016, the artist Selina Thompson did just that. Along with a filmmaker friend she made a boat trip from Britain to Ghana, then travelled to Jamaica, then back again.

Mike Nelson has turned the Duveen Galleries into a museum commemorating Britain’s industrial past (pictured below right). Scruffy workbenches, dilapidated metal cabinets and stacks of old drawers are pressed into service as plinths for the display of heavy duty machines. Rusting engines, enormous drills, knitting machines, crane buckets, a concrete mixer, a paint sprayer and various other unnameable objects are thereby elevated to the status of sculptures.

Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning.

This is an astonishing book: in its breadth, depth and detail and also in its almost palpable, and sometimes unpalatable, admiration of its subject, the controversial, long-lived Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012).

There is nothing quite like the Iffland-Ring in this country. The property of the Austrian state, for two centuries it has been awarded to the most important German-speaking actor of the age, who after a suitable period nominates his successor and hands the ring on. There were only four handovers in the entire 20th century. The most recent of them was in 1996, when the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz became the new lord of the ring.

Barbara Sukowa won Best Actress at Cannes in 1986 for her title role in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, and the power of her performance looks every bit as engaging and insistent today. A century after Luxemburg’s death (she was assassinated in Berlin on January 15 1919, her body then thrown into a canal), as her significance and influence as a political figure attracts new attention, the film deserves the handsome restoration it receives here in StudioCanal’s “Vintage World Cinema” strand; particularly – remarkable though it may seem, even given von Trotta’s rather neglected status as a director on these shores – as it’s really the first ever English-language home entertainment release in the UK.

Sukowa compellingly catches Luxemburg’s prowess as an orator, that force-of-nature ability to capture the attention of an audience – it's a performance that Sukowa seems to carry on the strength of her jaw alone. Rosa Luxemburg certainly opens as an extroverted film whose set pieces owe more to an older, more traditional style of European filmmaking (the score by Nicolas Economou is particularly stately) than to the New German Cinema from which the director herself emerged.

Von Trotta stresses the loneliness of her heroine

The changing panorama of revolutionary politics in Germany over the two first two decades of the 20th century can sometimes daunt, not least because von Trotta’s script is chronologically elliptical. It dots backwards and forwards, from an opening escape from imprisonment in Warsaw (which actually came later) through grand Berlin New Year celebrations in 1899 at which the fancy-dressed comrades (complete with Luxemburg ias a geisha) saw in the hopeful new century.

But it’s as Luxemburg becomes increasingly isolated – in her angry rejection of the Social Democrats’ collusion with the declaration of war, followed by long confinement in a German gaol – that the film’s greatest strength, its sense of an interior life, emerges. In the 20-minute interview that is the main extra on this release, von Trotta stresses the loneliness of her heroine: never afraid to criticise her Party colleagues, she was unsparing about the ruthless paths taken by the Bolsheviks in Russia. But the sense of personal separation is even more potent, something never assuaged by her passionate involvement (more on her part than his) with the revolutionary, Leo Jogiches (played by Daniel Olbrychski, pictured below with Sukowa), or a later affair with the much-younger son of fellow revolutionary Clara Zetkin, or even close friendships with women with whom, like Zetkin, she was part of a shared political circle.One of the stories that von Trotta heard from a surviving acquaintance during her research speaks volumes – of how when Luxemburg was at home on her own, she would eat across the table from her cat, Mimi (the feline ate from a plate, too: it took close on three months for the cat’s performance to finally come right). The source for this private portrayal was Luxemburg’s letters, though their gradual East Berlin publication was still highlighting public achievement over personal drama: von Trotta was allowed (on the strength of an earlier involvement with the Peace Movement) unusual access to the archives, something denied to some major West German historians before her.

The sense of the director’s engagement with her character becomes absolute, von Trotta creating a fully rounded portrait that goes far beyond the stereotypes of “Red Rosa” as a figure unflinchingly devoted to revolution at any cost; her directorial handling is as confident, as vigorous even as her subject. Rosa Luxemburg is a film as much about that almost abstract concept, moral development, as it is about particular historical events, a process that led her to convictions that put human life above ideology or dogma, as she articulated a powerful insistence on social justice that would especially chime with later generations. .

The other extra is a short interview with Sukowa, in which she remembers her surprise at the casting suggestion from von Trotta (“I thought she’d gone mad!”), given that the director had initially been looking for an actress who more obviously resembled Rosa as the short, dark, vibrant woman she had been in life. There may be something slightly more detached, chillier even, in Sukowa’s performance, but the sense she gives of the “profound intelligence and morality” of her character is unmatched.

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Overleaf: watch the German trailer for Rosa Luxemburg