We are taking refuge in the past, whether it's 'Call the Midwife' and 'Downton' on TV, Coward and Rattigan at the theatre, or neo-Romantics in the galleries. Where's the sensation, asks Philip Hoare?

The Ashmolean's new exhibition of Indian art from Howard Hodgkin's private collection is inspired by his love of the country. By Adrian Hamilton

The Ashmolean's new exhibition of Indian art from the private collection of Howard Hodgkin is inspired by his love of the country

Private collection

This week an exhibition of British painter Lucian Freud's drawings opens at the Blain|Southern gallery in London, staged to coincide with the major exhibition of his work at the National Portrait Gallery.

Lucian Freud's unflinching paintings reveal everything about their sitters' flesh and little of their personalities – indeed, are they portraiture at all?

As she celebrates six decades as head of state, i uncovers some curious facts about Her Majesty.

Band of Skulls singer, Emma Richardson, takes on the art world

All around us, we see the evidence that we are a much more open society than we were, say, 20 years ago. It is in the everyday things, like, for instance, the information we are given on public transport.

The American painter R B Kitaj, long resident in London, left England in grief-stricken disgust after critics had panned his retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. He died at his last home in Los Angeles in 2007. This mini-retrospective at the ever enterprising Abbot Hall Gallery in Cumbria is the first extensive sighting of his works in Britain since his death.

With the death of Lucian Freud, it is not just a towering artistic genius that the world has lost but someone who, in the words yesterday of his friend the art critic William Feaver, "stood up for humanity".