Culture

It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps to make amends it is treating us to possibly the most historian-studded, blue-screen-special-effects-enhanced, rare-documentastic, no-hyperbole-knowingly-under-employed series ever shown on television. Armada: 12 Days to Save England (Sundays, BBC2). Having clearly spent a lot of money here, the BBC is taking no chances with its demographic spread. For the laydeez, in the Ross Poldark role it has Dan Snow, captured somewhat gratuitously piloting his handsome yacht into the choppy waters of the English Channel. (Just like in 1588! Sort of.

Professor Stanley Wells writes that the newly identified picture of Shakespeare on the title page of Gerard’s Herball (1597) is ‘obviously not Shakespeare’ but neither he, nor Mark Griffiths, the botanist who made this discovery, have fully understood why it is obviously Shakespeare.  That the figure is a poet is undisputed.  In his right hand he holds a Narcissus lily (snakeshead fritillary) which is the flower that grew from the spilled blood of Adonis in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). In his other hand he holds a cob of ‘Turkey Corne’ (which we call ‘maize’ of ‘sweet corn’), again representing Adonis who is God of Corn.

If you’ve never watched Game of Thrones, it is a twee fantasy show in which men and women discuss politics at length, dance in Austen-like balls, and drink small amounts of wine by streams. Characters communicate as much by the angle at which they hold their fans or opera glasses as by the subtext of their artfully crafted bon mots. It has attracted a massive following for the cultured and intellectually stimulating qualities of the series, but there has been some outrage after the last episode featured what appeared to be a rape scene.

With Downton Abbey drawing to a close after the next series, Mr S suspects that, in the interest of historical accuracy, it may be for the best that it bows out sooner rather than later. After it initially began in 1912, the show has raced through the years at such pace that it has now spanned over a decade since the first series was broadcast in 2010. As a result, the cast are having a difficult time keeping up. Maggie Smith recently went so far as to suggest that her character, the Dowager Countess, would be lucky to be alive in real life: ‘I mean, I certainly can’t keep going... To my knowledge I must be 110 by now. We’re into the late 1920s.

The Royal Academy of Music's Sir Jack Lyons Theatre is closing, whether for refurbishment or to make way for something more ambitious I don't know. It's a place where I have spent many great evenings, with immense amounts of young vocal talent - most of it never heard of again - under the batons of Colin Davis, Jane Glover and other superb conductors. Next year's productions will be in Hackney, Shoreditch and in the underground hangar across the Marylebone Road. To bring the curtain down on the old theatre, the RAM chose two comic English one-acters, of a certain vintage, the 1950s - that abused decade. The first was Walton's The Bear, from Chekhov.

This article was first published on Apollo magazine’s blog The latest addition to Dulwich Picture Gallery’s permanent collection display was a bargain at $88. For weeks the cheap Chinese copy after Fragonard’s Young Woman – commissioned by contemporary artist Doug Fishbone – stood in for the original, unmarked and slotted into the old frame, as a challenge to visitors. Could they spot the ‘fake’? They could not, as it turns out. Of the 3,000 people who made a guess, only 12 per cent correctly identified the impostor. The rest of us walked past without a second thought – though perhaps with a slightly diminished opinion of poor Fragonard.

At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in which sinners guilty of simony, hypocrisy and graft are punished. The last of those spend eternity immersed in a river of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liquid, the poet noted, looks much like the tar that Venetians boil up in their arsenal to smear over the hulls of their ships. Those lines came to mind more than once as I walked around the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, not least because a large section is installed in the ancient buildings of that very Arsenale. The Biennale is always the same — the crowds! the people! — yet always different.