Royal families and royal academies. Aristocrats at ease in exquisitely landscaped gardens or inside in gorgeous drawings rooms. Actors emoting, notably Sir David Garrick and his troupe. Nabobs in India. All are depicted in Johan Zoffany’s rivetingly detailed paintings of Georgian society.

George VI had been my hero since childhood because I was such a terrible stutterer. We had been evacuated from England to the US and during the war, particularly the latter stages, my parents would encourage me to listen to the King’s speeches on the wireless. “Listen, David,” they’d say, “he was a far worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect but he can give these magnificent stirring speeches that really work. So there’s hope for you.” It didn’t help me at the time but I thought, wow, he’s brave.

The work of the photographer, theatrical designer, narcissist, snob, careerist, and exceptionally talented Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), including 18,000 vintage prints, negatives and transparencies, contact sheets and 45 books of cuttings are at the Victoria & Albert Museum. They have all been brilliantly culled for the alluring and significant exhibition of some of Beaton’s royal portraits, billed as A Diamond Jubilee Celebration. 

I can never quite work out Andrew Marr. Serious political journalist? Wannabe arts correspondent? Failed actor? Celebrity superfan? Anyway here he was, following the Queen around the world on a variety of exotic junkets, shouting at the camera and waving his arms about as if he'd been standing in the sun too long. 

Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe’s slick production for the Peter Hall Company, the show has finally arrived in the West End.

“I’m not a beautiful woman,” Wallis Simpson once declared. “I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.” Madonna’s second feature W.E. operates under a similar philosophy – with rather less success. Never knowingly under-dressed, under-designed or under-directed, the film contorts itself into ever more stylish poses in a desperate attempt to stun its audience into a couture-induced coma of submission.

My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was.

A recent newspaper article championed the topicality of Richard II, laboriously rewriting it from camp conservatism to a politically current meditation on the “sad stories” we still tell of the deaths of kings. Heads may have rolled and states collapsed this year, but thank goodness Michael Grandage felt no need to underline Shakespeare’s fragile lecture on kingship with gaudy contemporary markers.

Is it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simpson - widow of the abdicated King Edward VIII - lived as a recluse in a mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Despite the fact that a national treasure (Sheila Hancock) is starring in the play, is this a subject worth looking at again?

It’s a strange fact that very few plays look at the subject of contemporary British royalty. The past yes, but today very seldom. A notable exception is 1990s playwright Sarah Kane’s visceral account of a fictional royal family in her 1996 play, Phaedra’s Love, a spirited revival of which opened last night at the Arcola Theatre. As you’d expect from this playwright, it is a gruelling evening of joyless sex and horrific violence. But it is also bleakly funny.