Journalistic convention is that 2018 has completely gone and 2019 is entirely to come, with publications now looking strictly ahead. But, in culture, the old and new years blur.

Hit movies and books of the past 12 months will reappear over the next few months as DVDs or paperbacks. And the theatre practice of rewarding subsidised successes with transfers to a commercial venue means that we already know the quality of some of this year’s big London West End shows.
The Lehman Trilogy (Piccadilly Theatre, from May 11) gives a blessed second chance to those unable to see its sell-out National Theatre run. Three actors – Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley – astonishingly play dozens of characters (across race, age and gender) in this must-see single-evening condensing of Stefano Massimi’s three-part drama about the rise of the bank whose fall became symbolic of high-risk capitalism.

Another deserved commercial transfer from the National – to the Duke of York’s (from 26 January) – is Home, I’m Darling, Laura Wade’s disconcerting feminist comedy, with a cast led by Katherine Parkinson, in which a 1950s housewife turns out (for credible reasons) to have a laptop in her kitchen drawer.