It is the age-old debate – where is England’s second city?

This hotly-contested question over the unofficial title has fiercely divided the Brummies and Mancunians for decades.

In mid-20th Century Bengal in eastern India, some of the biggest female stars on stage were actually men.

Foremost among them was Chapal Bhaduri – better known as Chapal Rani – the reigning “queen” of jatra, a travelling theatre tradition that once drew vast, fervent crowds.

In setting out to make the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) comprehensible to a modern audience in her new book, How to Read Hegel Now, Shannon Hoff faces an enormous challenge.

There is, writes Reinier de Graaf, an “unwavering belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, architecture in its current form continues to represent a force for good”.

Fumbling for the keys to his Mercedes in a vain attempt to reach his carphone before it stops ringing, an aged but instantly recognisable Adolf Hitler all but ignores a hearty ‘Buenas noches, mein Führer’ from an elderly Nazi cycling past on an upmarket South American street, his arm extended in the time-honoured salute.

One of the most familiar topics of our time is the trouble many of us have in winding down at the end of the day. Insomnia is rife: crossing the threshold between day and night has become a challenge for many of us.

‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I was living in a crime scene.’ So writes the narrator 48 years after the strange events that unfold in this bitter, brief, shattering novel.

The Secretary of War is the face of America’s campaign against Iran. ‘War is hell, and always will be’, Pete Hegseth said recently. He is relentlessly focused on lethality, and decimating the Iranian military.

One of the oldest poems of the English people, Beowulf, ends with the burial of treasure, but it is a melancholy moment, the hoard ‘a crumbling legacy from a lost world’, after which the survivors drift off into exile, ‘the worst of Anglo-Saxon fates’.

A large black steam locomotive appears on the horizon. It drives forward towards the left of the screen and disappears beyond the periphery.