In the past few years, without any fanfare, the veteran playwright and Spooks script-writer Howard Brenton has not only made a comeback, but also become the chief chronicler of the nation’s past. One year he is telling the story of Harold Macmillan in Never So Good, then he’s doing a version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. He might make a detour to pray with St Paul or to converse with Abelard and Heloise, but then he comes back to English history with the award-winning Anne Boleyn.

Kalkadungu: Music for didjeridu and orchestra William Barton (didjeridu) (ABC Classics)

He arrives in a blaze of light and trumpets, but Jonathan Pryce’s King Lear seems as much charming, lovable father as imposing monarch as he sets about carving up his kingdom. What follows, though, brings a prickling sense of horror, as Michael Attenborough’s production lends a disturbing dimension to Shakespeare’s bleak tragedy.

Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times.

Purcell certainly doesn’t make it easy for the champions of English opera. His beloved Dido and Aeneas is barely half an evening’s entertainment, so condensed is its tragedy, and the dense political satire of Dryden’s King Arthur text all but requires translation if it is to make sense to a contemporary audience. And then there’s The Fairy Queen – the gauzy, gorgeous semi-opera whose music is the side-dish to a bastardised 17^th-century take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

With every new series, as he edges closer and closer to Dimbleby-ian National Treasure status, Simon Schama’s archly mannered drawl becomes more and more pronounced, his camp asides more central to his on screen persona. He is getting awful grand. And he now apparently “owns” our greatest dramaturge. Way to go.

“The film is a series of very curious, strange and macabre unbelievable incidents,” said director Ken Russell of The Devils in 1971. "The point of the film really is the sinner who becomes a saint." The tribulations surrounding its release, still fresh in Russell's mind, could easily have been described as curious and strange too. The long-overdue arrival on DVD of his career landmark is important. The Devils is one of the most astonishing and powerful British films.

The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel.

Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up.