Culture

We're closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here's number four: Zoe Strimpel writing in February about how popular portrayals of the past are being changed to fit the present.  The first thing you notice about Bridgerton, Netflix’s big winter blockbuster set in Regency England, is how bad it is: an expensive assemblage of clichés that smacks of the American’s-eye view of Britain’s aristocratic past. The dialogue is execrable, the ladies’ pouts infuriating. But bad things can be good, especially when it comes to sexy period romps. Bridgerton is no different. The story follows the elder children of the Bridgerton family as they look for love in a utopian sprawl of courtly landscape and sociality.

'May you live in interesting times’. So the Chinese curse goes, and we undeniably live in interesting times, alas. But that doesn't mean the past has lost any of its allure; indeed, quite the opposite. Right now, it's just the tonic we need. If you found history dull at school, being merely an endless parade of facts and heavy-handed analysis, then you are the perfect potential reader for these superb examinations of past eras by some of Britain's best popular historians.  Here are half a dozen of our favourite page-turning history books, guaranteed to have you rapt and astonished at the revelations therein. Dan Jones – The Plantagenets (William Collins, £10.99) Perhaps the most popular new historian of our generation is the medieval writer Dan Jones.

Cinema came of age in the 20th century and documented that epoch in all its trials and tribulations. Movies are for the most part escapist confections but they can also reflect our world back to us. To learn about the major events of the last century, it is sometimes as useful to turn to a film as to pick up a book. The following are ten movies that tell key chapters of the 20th century. The Great War, 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZjQROMAh_s World War I is the harder of the two world wars to make a movie about. It was not a good war, easily rendered into a Hollywood morality play about monstrous Germans, cruel Japanese, plucky Brits and heroic Americans.

A certain stigma has attached itself to audiobooks. To the old school bibliophile, they are the literary equivalent of pre-chewed steak. The sceptics may have a point. After all, reading is tiring for the same reason that chewing is - work is being done. The brain is just a lump of clever fat, of course, rather than bunched muscle, but it still uses up some 20 per cent of the calories we consume and so it shouldn’t really be surprising that we get tired reading. Taking the sequenced squiggles on the page and converting them into the architecture of a story, a philosophy or a verse, is hard. Children find it hard, students find it very hard and the vast majority of adults find it gets harder and harder as time goes on. This is bad news for books.

At the best of times, January is a depressing month. Everyone is feeling poor and bloated after the Christmas extravaganza, and the days are still short and cold, with the nights drawing in far too early. Nobody has ever said ‘I’m really looking forward to January’. Which is why, with the spectre of illness and infection still stalking the land, the best thing that we can do is to stay at home with some of the most cheering films that we can find, and hope to banish the January blues that way. Of course, everyone enjoys a whacky comedy, or a gripping thriller, and they definitely have their place. But these films represent some of the most uplifting and purely enjoyable examples of cinema that we’ve seen over the past years.

One of the first films ever produced, 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, revolved around a robbery of a steam locomotive train, and ever since then the genre has continued to be one of the most enduring in cinema. It isn’t hard to see why. The core elements of the heist film are some of the most solidly pleasurable devices in big-screen entertainment. They often consist of the wily and charismatic veteran thief, putting together a crew for a ‘last job’; a love interest who is either unaware of his or her plans or an enthusiastic participant in them; a supporting cast of various degrees of eccentricity or unreliability; an implacable nemesis, whether a lawman or a rival; thrilling action scenes; and exotic locations.

As we are now well into the unwanted Lockdown sequel and winter approaches, time perhaps to enjoy an enforced home cinema experience with a selection of movie thrillers that you may have missed the first time round. Titles range from big budget star vehicles to smaller scale pictures that introduced us to some of the possible on and off-screen icons of tomorrow. The Coldest Game (2019) – Netflix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12DftzVD2Gg I came across this Polish-produced Cold War thriller one night when searching for movies similar to Bridge of Spies (2015).

Back in March, around 4,000 years ago, the world was ending. Plague swept in from the east like a horde. Clam-tight lockdowns, unthinkable even days before, were announced everywhere. Who could save us? On March 18 our prayers were answered. An honor roll of Hollywood bluebloods took action. Assembled by Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, they created a video montage cover of John Lennon’s masterpiece — yes! — ‘Imagine’, which she posted — thank goodness! — on Instagram. ‘We’re all in this together,’ said Gadot’s expensive oval face, and, in a sense, she was right. Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo, Sia and Zoë Kravitz, Norah Jones and Amy Adams: they were all in this big wet bathful of tears together.

When you hear the word ‘stockpiling’, the first thought that pops into your head is probably the image of forest-dwelling folk in remote reaches of the US, usually bearded, always armed, with hunting vests, baseball caps, a few tonnes of canned food buried beneath their shack and enough kerosene to defrost Svalbard. Yet with the prospect of a hard Brexit edging ever closer, stockpiling has become a major pastime of businesses across the UK. The Economist have set aside 30 tonnes of paper to print their magazine, whilst Majestic have secured up to 1.5 million bottles of wine (should the worst happen, I know which warehouse I’ll be looting). Medicines and food are also being stored in bulk.