BETWEEN THE POSTS

 ~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 2nd 2012

An update on some recent stories:

There's another good reason why there's a fresh audience for Sherlock. The BBC series "Sherlock" returned yesterday, with the dominatrix in "A Scandal
in Belgravia" telling Holmes that "brainy is the new sexy". The Daily Telegraph
says one of the joys of the series is the way its creators have "devised ways of showing its protagonist’s mind working".

After hearing saxophonist Jorja Chalmers take centre stage with Bryan Ferry, we noted the return of the sax. Rolling Stone has a slideshow on the same theme with last year's 10 best pop songs featuring the sax.

David Hockney was just one in 23,000 British artists having their work uploaded to Your Paintings. In the New Year's Honours list he became one of only 24 holders of the Order of Merit. (We preview his new exhibition in Hockney thinks big.)

One birthday is enough wondered if the decline in attendance figures for the Church of England was related to the excessive chumminess of the vicars. There may be a decline in Britain, but The Economist this week reports that Christianity is thriving in sub-Saharan Africa: the Christian share of the population increased over the last century from 9% to 63%.

The poet Alice Oswald was eloquent in a poetic op-ed piece about the fraught relationship between sponsors and artists. This argument hasn't dissuaded the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and Tate Britain from accepting £10m from BP.

In Twitter on Christopher Hitchens we tracked spontaneous tributes to #hitch from Salman Rushdie (150,000 followers) to Sterling Sunley (0 followers). A fortnight later, Rushdie has 165,000 followers and Sunley still has none.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life.