In Depth:  Rachel Helen Smith

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Frozen fever has reached new heights.

Disney has announced that a seven-minute mini-sequel to the film will be shown in cinemas before screenings of their new live-action film, Cinderella.

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Is cosmology really ‘a kind of religion for intelligent atheists’?

This is what Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) claims in the recent film The Theory of Everything. The Oscar-tipped flick is based on the memoir of Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde. It tells of their marriage and the period during which Stephen develops motor neurone disease.

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Living in Cambridge, I have become accustomed to seeing my hometown transformed into a film set.

Within the last year alone we have played host to the cast and crew of The Theory of Everything, The Man Who Knew Infinity and ITV’s latest drama series, Grantchester. Filming of Grantchester began in March, when vintage cars and buses appeared on the iconic King’s Parade.

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Ian McEwan’s latest novel, The Children’s Act, pits religious belief against the law.

The title is a reference to the 1989 Children’s Act, which claims that when a court comes to deal with any issue concerning children, the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration. The Act discusses parental responsibility and states what should be done in cases where parents do not co-operate with the law or with statutory bodies. This is just what happens in McEwan’s novel.

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‘Who do you trust? How do you know?’

For the last few months the nation has been gripped by the BBC’s latest drama offering, The Honourable Woman. The plot focuses on the Middle East, but it is also the story of the personal struggles of the enthralling central character, Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

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‘Virginia Woolf was one of Britain’s most important writers and thinkers, who played a pivotal role at the heart of modernism in the early twentieth century.’

So says Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery’s current exhibition on Woolf is the first to use portraiture to explore her life and includes a collection of over 140 items. Her walking stick, letters to her sister, portraits of her friends and copies of her diaries have all been brought together by guest curator Frances Spalding, author of the accompanying catalogue Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision.

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‘Politics, art, history and race all tied in a big bow.’

That’s how director Amma Asante describes her latest film, Belle. Released in the UK in mid-June, it has met with huge acclaim both from audiences and film critics. Much of its success lies in the fact that it combines the traditional elements of a Jane Austen romance with a nuanced awareness of the difficult politics of the period.

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Coldplay’s latest album, Ghost Stories, has been hitting the headlines.

There are three reasons. 1. It has become the fastest-selling UK album of the year. 2. The band signed an exclusive deal with iTunes meaning that the album was not available on free music streaming websites like Spotify. 3. In an impressive publicity stunt, the band created an international scavenger hunt by hiding handwritten lyrics from the album in libraries across the world.

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The Snail. Blue Nude. Icarus. The Dance.

Matisse’s works are some of the most recognisable images in modern art. Now Tate Modern in London is hosting an exhibition devoted to his cut-outs, which he made during the final 17 years of his life.

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A Long Way Down, which came out in March, is the fourth of Nick Hornby’s books to reach the big screen.

First there was the semi-autobiographical Fever Pitch, in which Colin Firth played a fanatical Arsenal supporter. (An American version was also released featuring Drew Barrymore and the Boston Red Sox.) Then came High Fidelity, in which music-lover Rob reflects on a string of failed relationships. About A Boy featured the laddish Will, played by Hugh Grant, who befriends a young boy with a troubled home life. Now A Long Way Down presents an unlikely foursome as they contemplate suicide. With subjects like these, it’s little wonder Hornby is known for his dry, dark humour.

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When I asked my friends what the Bible has to say about The Great British Sewing Bee, one suggested that I read ‘The Parable of the Sewer’.

Other recommended references included the three-strand cord mentioned in Ecclesiastes, and the needle through which the camel struggles to squeeze during Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man. Such comments were meant to be playful rather than profound, but they hinted at the Bible’s fondness for fabric imagery.

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Billboard magazine recently named the R&B singer Beyoncé and her rapper husband Jay-Z the most powerful people in the music industry.

Beyoncé first rose to fame as the centrepiece of the best-selling group Destiny’s Child, before launching her multi-platinum solo career in 2003. She quickly became known as a diva with a soulful voice and a powerful persona.

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2013 ended with the successful TV series The Bible.

Hollywood now looks set to deliver a string of biblical epics over the next few years. Here are the films currently in development that you can expect to see appearing at a cinema near you:

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What better way to start the year than with a new episode of Sherlock?

Since its first episode back in 2010, the hit BBC show has established itself as one of the most successful reinventions of this classic fictional character. This is a resolutely modern, London-based adaptation: gone are Conan Doyle’s smog and carriages; in their place are laptops, mobile phones and Twitter hashtags. Our crime-solving hero is presented as ‘a new sleuth for the 21st century’, supplementing his trademark methods of logical deduction with cutting-edge scientific methods and the latest technology. Sherlock is brilliant, fast, dynamic, dapper and funny. Yet he’s also arrogant, odd, obsessive and, as journalist Amanda Mitchison puts it, ‘slightly Aspergers-ish’. He is able to make us laugh, but he’s also part of a world that is dark and frightening.

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Forget writing your cards.

Or making the Christmas cake or testing the fairy lights — you know that Christmas is truly getting close when you see the John Lewis Christmas advert on TV.

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Two names have appeared in the media countless times recently: Iain Banks and Peter Capaldi.

The popular novelist Banks died in June having announced two months earlier that he was dying of gall bladder cancer. Peter Capaldi made the headlines for a rather different reason —in August he was revealed as the new star of BBC’s Doctor Who. Do you know what connects these two men?

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‘I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety’ (1 Timothy 2.9).

A hot summer saw many of us dashing to the shops in search of new swimwear.

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This year the Glastonbury Festival was brought to a close by the indie folk band Mumford and Sons.

Earlier in 2013 they won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year with their second album, Babel, which was the fastest-selling album of 2012. Frontman Marcus Mumford must have been overjoyed, having told NME that he feared it would be a ‘disappointing second child’, living in the shadow of their first album, Sigh No More, which won the BRIT Award for British Album of the Year in 2011 and has gone four times platinum.

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‘I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written.’

So F. Scott Fitzgerald declared to editor Maxwell Perkins on finishing the manuscript of his partly-autobiographical novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The new film adaptation by Baz Luhrmann reminds us of the brilliance of a writer who became infatuated with the soulless glamour of the Jazz Age and simultaneously sought to critique it.