Anna Aslanyan

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.’

‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street … Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington’s brewery. Then Brick Lane, with half the women from our street jostling among the market stalls.’

A stencil portrait by Stewy, first painted on the wall of Newington Green Meeting House in 2013, was removed a few years ago during renovations. This week the artist returned to put it back.

Spreading ‘false’ information about Russia’s military, according to a law passed by the Kremlin last week, can put you in prison for fifteen years. For taking part in an unauthorised protest, you are likely to get fifteen days the first time; repeat offenders face up to five years behind bars. Many of the Russians taking to the streets in protest against the invasion of Ukraine have risked their freedom before. A decade ago, thousands were arrested at large-scale anti-government demonstrations. Some got two weeks; others, two years.