Academic who died in 1987 is thought to be responsible for documents that vanished over a 30-year period

Scotland’s national archive has traced the mysterious disappearance of more than 3,000 historical documents over a period of 30 years to a history professor with an all-consuming interest in stamps.

The theft began to unravel when a National Records of Scotland archivist attended an auction in London in 1994. There, he discovered that 200 of the items for sale belonged to the archive, some still marked with their NRS reference numbers.

Set in 1980s Spain, actor Paz Vega’s subtly affecting directing debut shows a family suffering under an abusive father, but is warmed by optimism and compassion

Spanish actor Paz Vega makes her directing debut with this sensitive portrait of domestic abuse and patriarchy in 1980s Spain. It’s told through the eyes of seven-year-old Rita (Sofía Allepuz), whose mum, Mari (played by Vega) is trapped in a violent marriage. We see the world how Rita sees it: filled with of moments of joy and discovery; her sense of wonder adds tenderness and hope to the story. It’s never voyeuristic (the violence happens almost entirely off screen), but Rita is effective at evoking how each member of the family is brutalised by abuse, living in a constant state of hypervigilance.

Rita works hard. Her little seven-year-old hands scrub, carry heavy plates and wash dishes to make her mother’s life a little easier. Rita’s five-year-old brother Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla), is anxious and timid, much to the irritation of their taxi driver dad José Manuel (Roberto Álamo). He is a man clenched with anger and frustration. “You’re an idiot,” he snaps at his wife with a contempt and fury that made me wince. Vega is terrific as Mari, a woman who is tender and loving with her children, but seems to have switched off some part of herself in order to live with José Manuel; she is on auto-pilot, drained and exhausted.

The Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s wildly imaginative epic The Devils was so extraordinary it demanded another viewing – or two

The Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s production of The Devils , based on the novel by Dostoevsky, is one of the extraordinary theatrical achievements of the last 40 years and one of the great experiences of my life – theatrical and otherwise. With a running time of around nine hours, it was also one of the longest. And I’ve seen it three times. That’s a lot of hours to give but none of them were wasted.

The first two occasions were in 1998 when the Maly played the Barbican in London. There were two options: watch it in three sections across three evenings, or do it all in one go – three hours per act, with an hour’s break between each. Being young, filled with Dostoevskian fervour, and still in possession of a stoic bladder, I did both.

A teenager hides 12 Jews in a basement under the nose of her Nazi boss in this tactful English-language drama

Here is an extraordinary true-life tale. For more than two years during the second world war, a teenager named Irene Gut kept 12 Polish Jews safe from the Nazis, hidden in a basement right under the nose of her boss, a high-ranking Nazi officer. Following the war, Gut emigrated to America and never spoke a word about her wartime experiences until the mid 1970s. Now the story of her remarkable courage and heroism is told very politely in an English-language drama that feels a little too tactful in places to really say anything about the horrors of Nazism.

Sophie Nélisse plays Irena, a Polish trainee nurse forced into slave labour by the Germans following the occupation in 1939, put to work first in a factory then a hotel. Then Nazi officer Rügemer (Dougray Scott) picks her to be his housekeeper – and when she moves in to his sprawling villa, Irena also sneaks in a group of Jewish prisoners whom she has been supervising at the hotel. When Rügemer is out during the day, the hideaways come out of the cellar to help cook and clean – anything to stop him making good on his promise to bring in more staff. The film doesn’t linger too deeply on the experiences of 12 mostly young Jewish people: the terror and the boredom and the tensions they must have felt, crammed in together month after month.

Residents of a Brussels apartment block contend with Nazi occupation; the existential threats to humanity explored; and a lively study of national and political boundaries

Alice Austen
Bloomsbury, £16.99 , pp368

To order 33 Place Brugmann , The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire or A History of the World in 47 Borders go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

The American painter built a multimillion-dollar empire but a new documentary highlights the dark side of a complex artist

Thirteen years after his death from an overdose of alcohol and valium, the American painter Thomas Kinkade’s brand lives on. The original Thomas Kinkade store in Carmel, California, still operates, and the official Kinkade Instagram account has a tidy, if modest, 67,000 followers. A recent partnership with Disney features, among other things, a 16-month calendar showing some of the Disney empire’s best-known faces in fantastical landscapes.

Still, this is but a shadow of the massive, multimedia Kinkade operation that reportedly netted over $2bn in total retail sales in 2004, licensing its images to everything from plates to calendars to greeting cards to actual Thomas Kinkade cottages that fans could live in. If you happened to be a sentient human being during the 1990s and 2000s, chances are you have at least some cultural memory of this artist who was as ubiquitous as could be. (Kinkade was fond of bragging that he reached the heights of everywhereness that Andy Warhol could only dream of.)

Tensions sizzle alongside burgers in the hazy timelines and brisk prose of the French writer’s disorienting debut

In recent novels set in restaurants, the breakneck speed of the action hides darker elements at work. Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher follows a restaurant worker whose life threatens to unravel amid his gambling addiction; in Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back , the world of waitressing is a front for Texas’s grimy underbelly. Beneath the surface frenzy of French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novel, On the Clock (translated by Jordan Stump), there is a similar stream of existential angst, its protagonist “mired in the heart of pointlessness”.

Baglin’s focus is intergenerational exploitation in the (French) workplace. She gives an impressionistic portrait of a young woman employed at a burger joint in brisk but unsparing prose, alternating between her unnamed narrator’s customer-facing drudgery – unfriendly co-workers, pestering managers, habitual injuries – and her childhood memories, particularly of her hot-tempered father, Jérôme, who toiled in a factory for 20 years.

On the Clock by Claire Baglin (translated by Jordan Stump) is published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Arts teacher and photographer Hicham Benohoud encouraged students to engage playfully with identity in postcolonial Morocco, for a project called The Classroom

Behind many symbols of quintessentially British culture – from Picture Post to Pevsner’s guides – were refugees who fled Europe in the 1930s and 40s

In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures – “bright, slim volumes”, as Owen Hatherley calls them, on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, “English clocks” and “British explorers”, written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It’s hard to imagine a more patriotic project (“a paroxysm of island backslapping”, Hatherley says) except that, “at every level except for the texts”, this was “an entirely central European endeavour”.

Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures , was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson.