Maggie Smith rarely gives interviews. In the week that Downton Abbey's last-ever series episode is broadcast, and she reprises on screen her role in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van (pictured below with Alex Jennings), theartsdesk revisits an encounter that took place in Highclere Castle in 2010. It was the only interview Dame Maggie gave that summer apart from one – which took place just before – to Julian Fellowes.

Frank Sinatra is back in London in the centenary of his birth. His disembodied voice is returning in a show called Sinatra: The Man & His Music. At the London Palladium, where he made his British debut 65 years ago, there’s to be a 24-piece orchestra, 20 dancers and video effects galore in a multi-media concert featuring many of his best-loved songs. At the heart of it will be footage supplied by the Sinatra Estate. For those who never saw Sinatra live, the idea is that this will be the next best thing, at least since the last time he was exhumed.

The world now knows him as Lord Crawley, stiff-backed in white tie and tails, regimental garb or, for relaxation, tweed. But before he became the face of Downton Abbey – and of bumbling institutional incompetence in Twenty Twelve and W1A – Hugh Bonneville could be seen in roles of considerable depth and range, including a moving Philip Larkin and a brutish husband in the BBC's Daniel Deronda.

Here's the astonishing thing about the 2014 Oscars: for the first time in memory, there are actually three or four nominees that - dare one say it? - actually merit consideration as the year's best. Is this because films are actually getting better? That seems a perverse argument to make amid a climate when so much talent is migrating away from cinema towards TV or even the stage (Steven Soderbergh, for instance, who is in rehearsals with a play Off Broadway).

This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who from 1957 pioneered research into sexual response. And then there is Sex Box, in which couples will perform the eponymous activity in the eponymous container and then come out and discuss it in front of Mariella Frostrup and a live audience. Would such a thing have been imaginable without Shere Hite?

The Flames of Paris, given its London premiere by the Bolshoi Ballet this weekend, was Alexei Ratmansky's farewell present to the Moscow company which he directed from 2004 to 2008. In his final months at the Bolshoi he talked with me in his office about his approach to revising this landmark historical ballet, and the conditions inside the theatre that he would soon be leaving after a turbulent five years.

In recent years theatre has sought assistance from a pair of popular art forms. Shows based either on movies, or on pop groups’ back catalogues, have become mainstays of the theatrical economy. So the latest musical to open in the West End has the whiff of  boardroom cynicism. What happens when you randomly select a famous film and an iconic songbook, yoke them together and shove them out in front of the footlights?

Oxford. A glum afternoon in early spring, 2000. Tourists clogging the city’s arteries. On a terrace overlooking the river Cherwell, a tour guide finishes her spiel and shepherds a flock of pensioners on to the next destination. A lone squat figure with silver hair, leaning contemplatively against the railings, doesn’t budge. The tour guide is convinced he’s one of hers. A quick cup of tea, she says kindly, and it’s back on the coach to Stratford. He turns the sad hound’s face on her, with its blowtorch eyes, and advises her brusquely of her mistake.

In the 1450s in Florence, Alberti was working on the facade of Santa Maria Novella, Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi were active, while Leonardo was born in nearby village of Vinci. And the English established a diplomatic presence. It has continued almost uninterrupted, pausing only in times of direct conflict. This month, it ends as the British consulate closes its doors for the last time. Cuts to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget and global geopolitical shifts mean that the United Kingdom no longer needs a man in Florence to tend to the needs of tourists and expats.

New York, late August 2010

I am at the opening of a swanky new gallery. Around me, the latest daubs by the hottest names adorn the walls of room after room. It’s worth mentioning a couple of discrepancies from your regular opening. This is a canapé-free environment, for one. There is no chilled white wine, no pretentious appraisal of carefully lit works. Nobody has come dressed to thrill. In fact, nobody has come at all. Apart from me.