That was 2010...

As midnight starts chiming around the globe, here's a hastily flung together few lists dipping into the cultural life of 2010. They're highly subjective, not at all comprehensive and I may well scrub the lot tomorrow and start again. It's a mixture of new and old - what I've come across this year, rather than the best of what's new. It's a (blurred) snapshot rather than a scientific survey...

Top three books of 2010

- The Music Room by William Fiennes
- A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
- Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore
(Solar by Ian McEwan, too, if I'm stretching to four)

Top three films of 2010

- A Single Man
- Heartbreaker
- I Am Love

Top three concerts of 2010

- Valery Gergiev and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6
- Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri in Krakow
- Maria Joao-Pires's Chopin Nocturne Prom in the Royal Albert Hall

Top three CDs of 2010
- Schumann's Davidbundlertanze and Fantasy in C from Mitsuko Uchida
- Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony from the RLPO and Vasily Petrenko
- Mozart's Piano Concertos from Imogen Cooper and the Northern Sinfonia

A Simple Medium

Films, perhaps, show us who we want to be, and literature shows us who we actually are. Sitcoms, if they show us anything, show us people we might like to know.
Tom Bissell in The New Yorker, in his profile of sitcom writer Chuck Lorre

The Dragon of Kraków

Meet the Kraków Dragon. A cheery fellow when he's in luminous green garb; a monstrous devourer of cattle and young virgins if you believe the legendary account. I've just finished writing a feature on his home city. This photo didn't make the final cut (well, it is a classical music travel feature), but he's found a home here – along with his scarily identical family – on Becca's Blog.

Beautiful coincidences

I like coincidences. Two days ago a friend recommended to me a BBC Four documentary (‘I never thought I’d say I had a good night in watching BBC Four,’ was his selling line). ‘Beautiful Equations’ does exactly what it says – it takes a look at the role beauty plays in maths. Art critic and artist Matt Collings is an engaging presenter as he investigates Newton and Einstein, quizzes Stephen Hawking on his black hole equations and gets scientists to explain what all those squiggles and numbers are all about. (It's for the general viewer rather than those who know their electrons from their positrons.)

My favourite squiggles were those of the so-called English Einstein, a Bristol-born physicist called Paul Dirac. Working in the first half of the 20th century, and using his own symbolic language, Dirac predicated anti-matter, and was one of the founding father of quantum mechanics. The reason he appeared in this programme was his underlying belief that the pursuit of beautiful equations would reveal the laws of nature. Beauty would be, in the words of Keats, truth, truth beauty. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the 'Dirac Equation' describing wave motions of electrons.

I was intrigued, although baffled by the mathematics. Anonymity was another of Dirac's desires (he had an incredibly literal mind that made social interaction a minefield), but biographer Graham Farmelo has written an acclaimed volume on his life. Time for a quick trip to the shops. I found a copy, and headed to the counter, where a girl in a festive green sparkly dress served me. When she saw what I was buying, her face lit up. 'Dirac. He's my hero!' Slightly surprised, given that I hadn't heard his name until the day before, we got chatting. It turned out that she was a physics student and artist, hence the love of Dirac. But there was another surprise to come.

'The programme talked a lot about the beauty of his mathematics,' I added. The reply: 'Yes, I've got his equation tattooed on my arm!'