A-Z of 2009: So much more than a Year

250 years after the birth of Robert Burns, 2009 is shaping up to be a hectic 12 months in the arts

A is for androids (but not Arnie)

Yep, mercifully reneging on the promise of his long-running catchphrase, Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be back in Terminator Salvation, due for release on 5 June. Instead, this latest instalment of the apocalyptic time-travelling killer-android franchise is being hyped as a "new beginning". Plot details remain sketchy, but from the recently released trailer we know that it's set in the year 2018, that Judgment Day has finally happened, and that the action of the previous films has altered the timeline of the apocalypse to such an extent that the machines pose an even bigger threat to the future survival of mankind than previously imagined (how convenient). But the question remains: will it be any good? Initially, almost everything about this smacked of desperation – it's being directed by Charlie's Angels' McG, after all, and revives a series that ran out of steam with its lame, self-parodying third instalment. Then Christian Bale signed on to play leader of the human resistance, John Connor, and suddenly excitement levels went through the roof, especially after McG revealed to a sceptical crowd of fanboys at this year's San Diego Comic Con that The Dark Knight's co-writer Jonathan Nolan had penned the script. With the tipped-for-stardom Sam Worthington cast as Bale's "is he/isn't he a terminator?" nemesis, Bryce Dallas Howard playing his wife, Helena Bonham Carter on board as "a very bad person", and plenty of cool-looking action sequences to salivate over, this is starting to shape up nicely. You might not even notice Arnie's not back. AH

B is for Benjamin Button

Actually, it's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though perhaps a more apt title would be the The Curious Case of David Fincher, since the Fight Club director's latest is a feelgood family movie, loosely adapted from an F Scott Fitzgerald story by Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth. Fincher describes the film – about a man who is born old and ages backwards – as "really heartfelt", but it may not be as radical a departure as it seems – his third collaboration with Brad Pitt, it involves some groundbreaking visual work and, if you follow the logic of the story, will end with a dead baby. "I like to think of it as being about the dents that we make on each other," says the director. Yep, sounds like a Fincher movie to us. AH

C is for (continuing) credit crunch

Why, the Queen has rightly asked, did no-one write anything warning us that the markets were about to fall off a cliff? The answer is that a few did, but the rest of us couldn't be bothered listening.

Financial Times assistant editor Gillian Tett's reportage on the imminence of a credit crunch won her the Business Journalist of 2008 at the British Press Awards. In Fool's Gold (Little Brown, March), she makes sense of credit debt obligation, credit default swaps and all the other apparently arcane subjects which turned out to have enough power to kick millions of people's lives around.

The bookshops already have plenty of other titles on the causes of, and how to live through, the credit crunch. And just in case the pessimists are right and recession turns into a depression, it's worth pointing out that sales of JK Galbraith's The Great Crash of 1929 are looking ominously healthy. DR

D is for Darwin

2009 is a double-whammy: 200 years since he was born, and 150 years since he wrote that rather famous book about life, our corner of the universe and everything.

Even publishers could see this one coming a long way off. The natural selection in the bookshops will see some of their offerings go to the wall, but at least there's a healthy variety of new Darwinia to work from.

The current crop started last month with James Taylor's lavishly illustrated The Voyage of the Beagle (Conway, 20), but it's only this month that the Darwin market heats up. Bill Price gets to grips with the theories behind On the Origin of the Species in Charles Darwin: Origins and Arguments (Pocket Essentials, 9.99), while in Darwin's Island (Little Brown, 29 January) geneticist Steve Jones ("the Alan Bennett of science writing" as the FT memorably describes him) argues that Darwin's 1859 breakthrough was so brilliant and all-encompassing that it has obscured many of his other discoveries. It's the epic nature of the Beagle voyage that draws in the non-scientists among us to the Darwin story – people like San Franciscan Eric Simons, whose Darwin Slept Here (Duckworth, February) follows in the great man's footsteps across South America.

The real science, however, often happened in the far less exotic surroundings of Down House, which is where Michael Boulter's Darwin's Garden (Constable, February) comes in. But for a new take on what really motivated Darwin to pursue his controversial ideas, in Darwin's Sacred Cause (Allen Lane, 29 January) biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that it was his detestation of slavery that underpinned his determination to publish his ground-breaking work.

Why? Because at the time slavery's supporters argued that blacks and whites had originated as different species. Darwin argued that we all have a common ancestor, and therefore believed in racial unity. A man for our times indeed.

Want more Darwinia? Damien Hirst has designed the cover for the new Penguin Classics edition (30, hardback, February) of Origin of Species. And if you want a real Darwin writing a book on Darwin, look no further than Ruth Padel's Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, February). As well as being an accomplished poet in her own right she is the great man's great, great, granddaughter. DR

E is for Enlightenment

Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, believes that arts festivals should be "about ideas". "If I have a role as festival director it's in thinking about the shape of the journey," he told The Scotsman when he launched his second EIF last summer. "Festivals are intrinsically integrated experiences, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

For the 2007 festival, Mills's big idea, Artists Without Borders, reached all the way across the globe, with work from Israel, Palestine, Iran and Lebanon, as well as throughout the "West". This year, appropriately for the Year of Homecoming, he seems to be looking closer to home – his big idea for 2009 is to explore the Scottish Enlightenment, in a programme that he says "highlights Scotland's influence on some of the world's great artists and artistic endeavours and reflects on that extraordinary moment in Scottish history now considered the foundation of much of modern thinking". To find out what this will all mean in practice, we'll need to wait until the programme is announced on 25 March, but Mills's track record, and his artistic and intellectual ambition, suggest we could be in for a treat. AE

F is for Faber

Four years ago, Penguin was banging the drum about turning 70; this year Faber will be going one decade better. As part of the celebrations, Joseph Connolly has written a history of the publisher's iconic design, and new "Faber 80" editions are planned of books by Rohinton Mistry, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orhan Pamuk, William Golding and Sylvia Plath.

Incidentally, just so you're ready for the pub quiz question: the second "Faber" in Faber & Faber didn't exist. Geoffrey Faber, the All Souls fellow who lured TS Eliot away from Lloyds Bank to join in his new company, just thought that an implied partnership sounded classier. DR

G is for Godot

When the National Theatre in London announced the results of its poll to find the greatest play of the 20th century, it was no surprise to find Samuel Beckett's 1953 masterpiece in first place. Famously described by one critic as the play in which "nothing happens, twice", Waiting for Godot draws on a huge range of influences, including Charlie Chaplin's "tramp" movies, to create a play that challenges every conventional idea of drama, and comes to life only in the hands of great actors. So when it was announced that no less a double-act than Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart would tour in a new production this spring, wise theatregoers wasted no time in stampeding for tickets. Sean Mathias's production visits Edinburgh in April, en route to London; don't miss what should be the most high-powered exhibition of star acting Scotland has seen in a decade. JMcM

H is for Homecoming

Homecoming is bittersweet at best if only a few dogs and an old nurse recognise you. The greatest trial in the Odyssey, quite unexpectedly, is the arrival in Ithaca: change all around, and new suitors to contend with. For a sea-girt nation of travellers, the Odyssey is still the myth of myths, and at the threshold of the Year of Homecoming, it is as well to remember how it ends.

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns's birth, the Scottish Government has issued an invitation – or is it a challenge? – to all of Scots birth or descent to make a return to the homeland. Famous Scots – Sean! Chris! – are on TV, trying to lure us back. Our politicians are understandably chary about "blood and soil" rhetoric, or any kind of militaristic rallying cry, preferring Burns, Golf, Whisky, Ancestry, Great Scottish Minds and Innovations as the pillars of Homecoming. These are, of course, the very things that made Scotland an international nation – or part of a global empire – in the first place, so there's a touch of "Melton Mowbray pie syndrome" about the initiative. You'll remember a recent European ruling that not just anyone could stick some jellied pork into a pastry shell and give it that name. By the same token, the world is being invited to remember that Burns was an (unsubsidised) Scottish farmer before he was a Jacobin and a Bolshevik, and that he once enforced duty on another of Scotland's iconic inventions.

Golf is more problematic. As far as most international players are concerned, St Andrews is Ithaca, which means that Muirfield is Circe's island, and the rocks off Carnoustie are swarming with sirens. As far as most locals are concerned, Scottish golf is haunted by a giant – two-eyed but as petulant – called Colin Montgomerie.

Ancestry is a cinch. It's the reason many visitors come back anyway, as part of that outsize constituency misleadingly, and even insultingly (though not to the Scots) known as our diaspora. If nothing better comes out of 2009, it should be a moratorium on that very loaded word. Since there is already a Tartan Day in the US, and tartan was invented in any case by two camp Italians, tartan has wisely been dropped from the masthead.

Great minds and innovations are perhaps the most problematic part of the mix. Nothing defines us more sharply, and nothing holds us back more egregiously, than our national obsession with past glories. Even if setting aside our former glories – which is painful but salutary, as the case of Thomas Carlyle suggests – reveals a dismal shortfall in the present, that may be enough to stir us on to fresh and concentrated effort.

The Year of Homecoming isn't simply a tourist campaign. It is also an invitation/challenge to talented Scots to return home and put their skills to work here rather than "in the south" or "abroad". I returned to Scotland in 1994, albeit without obvious talents to declare at the border. For the previous six months, I'd gently contradicted friends' questions about how it felt to be "going home", on the grounds that I'd been away from Scotland longer than I'd lived there, and for nearly all of my adult life to date. For entirely personal and unexpected reasons, it felt more of a homecoming than I'd expected. A few youthful nurturers were, and are, still around, and a couple of dogs barked in a friendly way. But Scotland had unmistakably changed: more confident but also more jittery; self-aware but with a painful self-consciousness as well; more multicultural but also more narrowly nationalistic. The new suitors – Far East science and technology; American expertise in medicine (albeit of Scottish provenance); newly vocal Asian, Nordic and Polish communities; lots more English voices – were impressive, but Scotland didn't seem any less Scottish for their presence. Just a little more contentious, and it may be that contention defines us best.

The Year of Homecoming culminates with contest. The Gathering is to be the country's largest ever Highland Games, held in Holyrood Park on 25 July, and followed by a mass clan parade up the Royal Mile. This may prove the most bittersweet moment of all, as local lads are thrashed at caber-tossing by pituitary cases from Manitoba, and the massed marchers the following day demonstrate how little the surviving clan system is now connected to the land. Whisky will be drunk, a few holes may get played, and doubtless Burns will be quoted often. And all to the good, if it leads to some return of an old understanding: that to be Scottish is more than mentality or lifestyle in the "diaspora" (let that be the last time) but is intimately connected to a place. This place. Sea, land, hills, farms, towns. BM

I is for The International

Clive Owen may have lost out to Daniel Craig in the fight to become the sixth James Bond, but he's about to get the last laugh. While Craig has struggled to breathe life into two flabby 007 flicks, Owen, free from all the pressure associated with the Bond franchise, has been working away on a real spy thriller for our times – something that will make Quantum of Solace look like a relic from a bygone age.

Directed by Tom Tykwer, whose credits include the breathless chase film Run, Lola, Run, The International promises an intelligent plot that speaks to contemporary concerns – not a sloppy, cobbled-together storyline that tries to make itself seem relevant by throwing in some spurious gibberish about water shortages in South America. Owen stars as an obsessive Interpol agent who discovers that one of the world's most powerful banks is involved in all sorts of illegal activities, including money laundering, arms trading and the destabilisation of governments, and sets out to take them down.

In other words, The International promises to deliver the spectacle of corrupt, fat-cat bankers getting the kicking they deserve – which arguably is what cinema-goers are going to want to see now the recession has really started to bite. It's out on 27 February. RC

J is for James Cameron

In the 11 years since declaring himself "King of the World" on Oscar night, James Cameron's subsequent "reign" bears all the hallmarks of an extremely rich filmmaker enjoying semi-retirement by toiling away on a few hobbies just to keep himself busy. First came those interminable underwater Imax films (and that bizarre collaboration with Time Team's Tony Robinson). Then there was the Jessica Alba-launching TV show Dark Angel. After that came the forays into Da Vinci Code-style religious documentaries (The Exodus Decoded, The Lost Tomb of Jesus). There was a spot of proper producing on Steven Soderbergh's Solaris remake and, finally, there was an amusing cameo on HBO's Hollywood satire Entourage (where he at least pretended to be making another movie).

What's the Terminator/Aliens/Titanic director really been up to, though? Fingers crossed, the answer will be with us come Christmas. That's when he's due to unleash his new 3D science fiction movie Avatar – a film so mind-blowing it will revolutionise the way we watch movies. That's the hype anyway. First conceived back in 1995, Cameron promised this epic, eco-themed tale about advanced civilisations supplanting indigenous cultures would make use of synthetic actors (surely some irony there), but he shelved it in order to let the technology catch up. And now it has. According to an interview he gave to the New York Times as production was getting underway in early 2007, he's developed a camera system that has allowed him to film the story – about a war between a human army and an alien army on a distant planet 150 years from now – as if it were entirely live-action, with actors and CG characters co-existing on the same virtual set, allowing much more fluid interaction.

Terminator Salvation star Sam Worthington will take the lead as a paralysed marine who undergoes an experiment to exist as an avatar that takes the form of a ten-foot alien. Which certainly sounds spectacular, especially when you factor in Cameron's dedication to 3D. Indeed, cinema chains and piracy-fearing studios are banking on Avatar leading the 3D revolution -– and convincing other filmmakers that this is the future for blockbusters. The main thing, though, is that Avatar marks James Cameron's return to science fiction. AH

K is for Kate and Leo

This month sees Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reunited on screen for the first time since Titanic, once again playing lovers – and the choice of film seems a little like a sick joke at the expense of nostalgic Titanic fans. Revolutionary Road, an adaptation of Richard Yates's bleak satire about 1950s America, is in some ways the anti-Titanic – or, depending on how you look at it, a harder-edged, less romantic companion piece