Grassroots Democrats seek to make ‘judicial activism’ a driving voting issue, but swing voters have other priorities

“Look at me, look at me,” said Martha-Ann Alito. “I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you.”

It was a bizarre outburst from the wife of a justice on America’s highest court. Secretly recorded by a liberal activist, Martha-Ann Alito complained about a neighbour’s gay pride flag and expressed a desire to fly a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag in protest.

The German actor discusses how he approached playing the fashion legend in a new TV series, navigating his ambition, idiosyncrasies and relationships

Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific fashion designer of the 20th and 21st centuries, was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Biographies contradict one another. His age was a mystery, with reports that he had two birth certificates, one dated 1933 and the other 1938. Living alone in Paris with a Siamese cat called Choupette, he once declared: “I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.”

Capturing Lagerfeld on screen might therefore seem like pinning down a ghost. But that did not deter the German-Spanish actor Daniel Brühl who, early in his preparation for playing the revered couturier in a six-part TV series, had an epiphany. What if he conceived of Lagerfeld as a matador in the bullring?