Anna Aslanyan

‘Let the Minion skate!’ people were urging on social media days before the start of the Winter Olympics. Universal Pictures had refused Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté permission to perform his Minions-inspired figure-skating programme in Milan. Eventually ‘the internet did its thing’ and he was allowed to go ahead with his performance.

On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library’s St Pancras building. ‘We’ve got a library with no books, no readers, no digital content, no front-facing staff and absolutely no clue!’

John Heartfield was forced to leave Germany in 1933. Even before the Nazis put him on their hit list, his art had caused controversy. In 1928 he designed the cover for a book about the mores of the German top brass (Erotik und Spionage in der Etappe Gent by Heinrich Wandt). When it was banned, Heartfield produced another, turning the censor’s scissors against the censor.

Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer. Not everyone who came to the film’s UK premiere at the BFI last month realised that Schtinter was in it.

‘Thieves are getting smarter,’ a bike mechanic told me. ‘They know what’s expensive and they look for these parts.’ He showed me a pair of gear shifters worth £900, which could be removed relatively easily: you just need to unscrew the stem bolt and cut through the brake cables. That’s what happened to my bicycle last year (my shifters would have fetched much less than £900). The mechanic never parks his bike outside: ‘I don’t even have a lock.’