“... to report that American Gangster is a stylish and intelligent contribution to the genre evoked by the title, a little overhaunted by past masterpieces and in the end perhaps dwarfed by them, but gripping and troubling all the way through. The film is based on the ‘true story’ of ...”

“... That a week is a long time in politics is one of those wise sayings which usually turns out to be untrue. Not now. All those articles written only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing ...”

“... One history of British photography that can be put together from How We Are: Photographing Britain (at Tate Britain until 2 September) traces changes in what people chose or were able to record. From the very beginning, photographers took over the mundane job of representation in portraiture and topography. But they also wanted – or were asked – to capture on film things that were fleeting, strange or dangerous ...”

“... Vampires seem to be making a comeback these days, and not just at night and from the grave. In broad daylight you see sleek sets of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels everywhere, and the first of no doubt many movies based on the series opened at the end of last year.* But vampires haven’t really been away. From Dracula to Buffy they have sustained an extraordinary attendance record among human communities, have never stopped being almost everyone’s favourite form of the undead ...”

“... to shoplifting pork and beef: ‘College was supposed to straighten me/like a bent tree strangled by a wire,/but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.’ She had a special line in bad or stinky sex: a teen defloration felt like ‘trying to cram a washrag/down a bottle neck … In the end the inside of me/was not wiped ...”

“... Wilder concentrate on the delirium, which he definitely wasn’t going to let go. It wouldn’t be a screwball comedy if it didn’t depend on loose screws, on faith and fragile logic rather than reliable engineering. Even the date, about twenty years too late to keep company with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in ...”

“... Gallery of Scotland​ is now linked with the Royal Scottish Academy building. You can enter by the restaurant which lies between the two buildings at a lower level, or through the portico of either neoclassical structure. The RSA provides a large space for major loan exhibitions, and since these have surpassed in appeal the quieter pleasures provided ...”

“... Salome kicks her leg up as Herod Antipas, corpulent and sagging, takes in the spectacle, flanked by his bride, dark-eyed Herodias. The king’s rheumy gaze is fixed on his stepdaughter’s nakedness. In the corner, a kneeling servant proffers Salome’s reward, chosen at her mother’s behest: the severed head of John the Baptist, gory and ragged, already ...”

“... Siècle et la vision de Dieu, a collection of 63 French 17th-century religious pictures which can be seen at the Villa Medici in Rome until 28 January, Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor challenge us to take theology as seriously as aesthetics. They also prove that it requires more than a sensitive eye and a generous imagination to understand a picture. The ...”

“... matter of who keeps drinkable water flowing through the taps and takes our shit away. It has to be Thames – all too often the River Thames, in the latter case. Theoretically, householders are allowed to dig their own wells and install septic tanks, but you’d have to be desperate, moneyed, time-rich or obsessive to do ...”

“... family with that of a poor family in east Asia, say, or the Horn of Africa. The answer used to be simple: free up the markets, oppose trade barriers for producers in the developing world, extend bilateral aid to their countries, but be sure to eat up, because the more we put away, the better off the struggling poor will ...”

“... is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry ...”

“... herself as a French Surrealist icon and a British war correspondent, her name could sometimes be confused with Lee Friedlander’s, even though he was a very different artist with a long-term, stable fame. Lee Miller’s fame kept growing, but it was unstable, even too fragmented to outlive her. Right now her name is largely unrecognised, except ...”

“... moving into the Victorian terraces in the area. Their arrival galvanised a district long blighted by the noisy steam trains that thundered in and out of Euston; Drummond Street became the heart of the community. When the main line out of Euston was electrified in the mid-1960s and steam engines were replaced ...”

“... Ari Shavit​ is a Haaretz columnist admired by liberal Zionists in America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home ...”