Sometimes cultural news is just bad news. Everyone was delighted at the thought that Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland was being turned into a film directed by Anton Corbijn. It was a play with a dazzling twist. That bitter intelligence, Patricia Highsmith, is in her Swiss hideaway awaiting a visit from her publisher’s emissary but when he arrives it rapidly becomes clear that he is Someone Else. Switzerland is a brilliant piece of writing for that elusive beast the popular stage, pacey, creepy and alive. It was a play that could bear comparison with Sleuth, the stage thriller by Anthony Shaffer – the other Shaffer brother – which was apparently a favourite of Agatha Christie herself and which made dazzling use in the film version of the talents of Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine.

All of which makes some reports of the film renamed A Talent for Murder and comprehensively re-written by Joanna Murray-Smith in ways that sound at least needless and unhelpful if not dismaying. It requires a lot of extra plot from Helen Mirren and – more particularly and extensively – from Alden Ehrenreich, who has to make the running with elaborate realigning manoeuvres that come across like a distraction from the concentration of the God-given initial plot and suggest a fantasia which has more time for the young Han Solo than for Mirren as the initial source of nightmare and metamorphosis.

Of course we have to rejoice that Joanna Murray-Smith can write variations on her own theme but this gets disturbing in the wrong kind of way. We’ll have to wait and see: it opens in Australia on Boxing Day.

In the meantime if you find the mature Mirren irresistible you can content yourself with the new series of MobLand (Paramount +) in which the veteran of Shakespeare and Prime Suspect is adopting an Irish accent like a battle-axe in her portrayal of the Harrigan matriarch. She’s partnered in this endeavour by Pierce Brosnan sporting one of the regional Irish accents – is it the accent of Kerry? It scarcely matters because Brosnan embraces his role as gangster extraordinaire with great hymns to mutilation with an elegance that is hair-raising. He’s so handsome in old age that it’s easy to forget how good he was as the Blair-like PM in Polanski’s film of Robert Harris’s The Ghost.

This is the second season and if the first is anything to go by – and it was wild and exhilarating in a way that made you forgive it anything – the wait has been worth it. The Harrigans, having seen off the Stevensons, are confronted now by something a good deal more formidable: an extraordinary appearance by Janet McTeer as Kat McAllister, whom we glimpsed at the fag end of the first season and who turns out to be not only a crime boss but the newly appointed American ambassador, which gives a literal edge to the line about her mob having eight trillion in cash and the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal. Here is America’s representative at the Court of St James, citing JFK’s appeasing father and protected by diplomatic immunity. Guy Ritchie’s direction is lightning fast and bloodcurdling and Tom Hardy, as the fixer, is mesmerising.

In a recent interview in the Times, Brosnan was asked whether there was anything of Trump about Conrad Harrigan – he said no: ‘It’s more Jacobean tragedy, Shakespearean, the king in his domain. It’s quite hilarious, a medieval humour – barbaric and chaotic.’ He’s right, of course, and it’s the whole secret of the show’s power: a king going off his head with a son – Paddy Considine’s Kevin – waiting for him to die and a wife more savage than he is and a dialogue with a swagger we rarely see on stage any more. Only these two could get away with ‘I love you like a tramp loves paraffin’.

Ghosts of history confront us everywhere. Kate Grenville in her latter-day writing has become a connoisseur of history in minimalist mode and has just released another history book, The Country Schoolmaster.

Inga Clendinnen – a notable historian – had a horror of updated history. It’s interesting, given this, that Hilary Mantel, whom Inga adored for the vibrancy of her non-fiction, should have become a historical novelist in Wolf Hall.

T.S. Eliot said Shakespeare got more history out of Plutarch than anyone else would get out of the British Museum. Listen to John Gielgud as Cassius in the Mankiewicz film of Julius Caesar.

‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus, and we petty men….’

Are the baby boomers the last generation to be able to quote Shakespeare? We can only trust not. Phillip Adams referred to the wonderment of Shakespeare. Robert Richter, the silk, likes to quote Robert Bolt’s neo-Shakespearean Thomas More who is one of Mantel’s pet hates.

Is it really true that a lot of people have forgotten how staggering they found Patrick White when they first read him? Or Christina Stead in The Man Who Loved Children. Then there’s the figure of Sidney Nolan and the tangle of intimacies with Sunday and John Reed which together with his time in the Wimmera went to create his Ned Kelly. We should treasure the grandeur of the national literature and art we have.

And try not to forget significant openings. The other night we missed the opening of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming with Richard Piper as the father from hell and Kate Kendall as the wife. It’s said to be brilliant. And it’s important to realise that Harold Pinter is a crucial part of our own dramatic inheritance. That great critic Northrop Frye said once that all the great English playwrights between Ben Jonson and Harold Pinter were Irish – a remark that indicates just how highly he thought of Pinter. It’s interesting that this revival with Greg Carroll at the directorial helm is the work of actors in the first instance. If you want a black comedy in the grandest language, you won’t beat Ben Jonson’s Volpone – which was Brosnan’s point – and the same thing is true of the greatest Pinter. He was a lord of language, a radical liberal who had also been a jobbing actor and knew everything about the theatre that repertory work could teach.