The New Murrey and Blue blog

This is another fascinating BBC2 series, illustrating English and British history through the evolution of our art. The eight one-hour episodes, narrated by David Threlfall (Men of the World), feature:
The Roman and pre-Roman periods, Beowulf, the Norman conquest and the Bayeux Tapestry;

The Black Death, Wilton Diptych, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, the East Window at York Minster and Death and the Gallant;
The Reformation and rival queens, Foxe‘s Book of Martyrs, the Marian Hangings (embroideries not people), William Morgan’s Welsh Bible, the Armada and Shakespeare;
The Stuarts, van Dyck and Rubens, the Civil War Cromwell “warts and all”, the Restoration, Milton, science, Aphra Benn, Wren and St. Paul’s;

Reynolds and Hogarth, Empire, satire and the Industrial Revolution, Swift, Burns and Austen;

Urbanisation, heavy industry, arts and crafts Turner, Cobbett, Gaskell, the pre-Raphaelites and Sickert;

The two World Wars and Irish independence, W.B. Yeats, the Bloomsbury Group, Sir William Orpen and the Unknown Soldier, the Jarrow March, Barbara Hepworth, Colonel Blimp and the Festival of Britain;

Kitchen sink drama, Hockney and Larkin, Hanif Kurieshi, Trainspotting, Hirst and Emin, Harry Potter and Cool Britannia.

On the whole, although the content is excellent, the era for each episode seems to become shorter as the series progresses away from the mediaeval era and it focusses increasingly on a particular political agenda.