This year I am one of the judges for the Art Fund Museum of the Year prize.

On Monday the longlist was announced, and here it is for you to see.  It’s a really strong year. Just look at all those millions of pounds: we’re seeing the completion of projects that started before the recession.  I’m not allowed to tell you exactly what we debated, but at one point I was voting in a minority of one against the rest of the committee!

Which of them do you want to see on the shortlist?  Do let me know…

1. Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, Bucks: The Life and Works of Alan Turing. Bletchley Park is the historic site of secret British code breaking activities during WWII and the birthplace of the modern computer.

2. The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, West Yorkshire: The Hepworth Wakefield. Designed by acclaimed architect David Chipperfield, Hepworth Wakefield opened in May 2011 following a £35 million development bringing together Wakefield’s art collection.

3. The Holburne Museum, Bath, Somerset: The Holburne Museum Development Project. The Holburne Museum reopened in May 2011 following a £11.4 million refurbishment. The new contemporary extension attracted over 100,000 people within the first six months of reopening.

4. M Shed, Bristol: A New Museum for Bristol. Bristol’s new museum is devoted to telling the story of the city and its people.  The £27 million development opened in June 2011 and has already attracted almost 450,000 visitors.

5. The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh: Portrait of the Nation. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery reopened following a £17.6 million transformation in December 2011, the first refurbishment in the museum’s 120 year history.

6. National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh: National Museum of Scotland Development. The £47.4 million redevelopment of the National Museum of Scotland aimed to reinvent the grand Victorian vision of an encyclopaedic museum for the contemporary era.

7. Riverside Museum, Scotland’s Museum of Transport and Travel, Glasgow: Riverside Museum Project. Incorporating Glasgow’s well-loved Museum of Transport with new ways of displaying and interpreting the collections, the Riverside Museum opened in June 2011.

8. Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter, Devon: RAMM Development Project. With collections ranging from fine art to archaeology, botany to geology, the museum attracted over 50,000 visitors within its first month of reopening in December 2011.

9. Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent: Turner Contemporary. Turner Contemporary is the new art gallery for Margate, Kent, which opening in April 2011 following a £17 million development.

10. Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey: The Watts Gallery Hope Project. Watts Gallery, devoted to the work of Victorian painter George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) has been long listed for the prize following the success of its £10 million refurbishment.

Hello, tomorrow you can hear my desert island choices of classical music on Michael Berkeley’s ‘Private Passions’, Radio 3 at midday.

‘Michael Berkeley welcomes the lively TV historian and Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces Lucy Worsley. Her popular TV series ‘If Walls Could Talk: A History of the Home’ found her peering into the forgotten domestic corners of history, finding out how people in past centuries really lived – how they slept, ate, cooked, bathed and disposed of their waste – by recreating the experience. She has also presented ‘Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency’ for BBC4.

Lucy takes an equally practical, no-nonsense approach to music, and unusually, her choices for ‘Private Passions’ are nearly all pieces she has played or sung herself. They range from piano works by Erik Satie, Mozart, Bach and Liszt, to Verdi’s Requiem (in which she sang as a tenor!) ; Jerome Kern’s ‘Long ago’, which she performed at a Society of Antiquaries’ dinner when she took the injunction to ‘sing for her supper’ quite literally; and Joseph Winner’s Little Brown Jug, in which she has played the tenor sax solo in a big band arrangement.’

Queen Anne, The Politics of Passion, by Anne Somerset, Harper Press, £25.

Here’s my review published in today’s London Evening Standard.

Poor old Queen Anne. I’m not being patronising; it’s exactly how she thought of herself. Her chosen pseudonym in signing letters to her best friend, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was “your unfortunate Mrs Morley”. Certainly she seemed pitiful in obese, arthritic old age: “ill-dressed, blotted in her countenance and surrounded with plasters”.

Poor unlucky Anne endured 17 pregnancies but saw none of her children survive, had a deficient education, and doesn’t seem to have been particularly clever, warm or likeable. But she was also doubly unfortunate that the poisonous Sarah, her one-time favourite, became an implacable foe. Sarah, a far more gifted communicator, has left us in her own writings on Anne a prejudiced portrait painted in bile.

From this unpromising premise, Anne Somerset does her best to redeem her subject. Somerset gives Anne the benefit of every doubt, and rightly points out that in her short reign (1702-1714) Britain itself was created, with the Union of Scotland and England, then set on its path to future greatness with the Duke of Marlborough’s success in Continental wars. Anne’s changing allegiances may make her seem weak and inconsistent: she supported the overthrow of her father, James II, in 1688, before falling out with her sister Mary, her predecessor as queen, and continued to flirt with their exiled half-brother the “Pretender”. And yet, this shilly-shallying sailed her safely through the storms, and she both took the throne and relinquished it at her death without bloodshed.

Anne wrote to Sarah in the early days of their friendship that “I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you’. Emotionally needy, latterly estranged from Sarah, she cuts a lonely figure. She was buffeted painfully by the party politics of her reign, forced to play the Tories off against the Whigs, and limiting her ambition to keeping “out of the power of both”. Despite this, she diligently attended more Cabinet meetings than any other monarch. You could forgive her for seeking comfort elsewhere. It was said that her dreadful health would have been better had she “not supped so much chocolate”, and it would take 14 men to carry her enormous coffin.

Somerset has nothing exciting to say on Anne’s lesbian tendencies, concluding that her relationship with Sarah was never physical. But Anne’s husband, George of Denmark, is one of the book’s surprises. Usually written off as a nonentity, said to love only “news, his bottle, and the Queen”, George seems here entirely and worthily beloved by Anne. Contemporaries said he “never appeared vigorous or active, but was singularly useful in keeping the Queen steady”. After 25 years of marriage, Anne was seen “kissing him the very moment the breath went out of his body”.

Somerset proposes rhesus blood incompatibility as an explanation for the couple’s tragic reproductive failures. As miscarriage followed miscarriage, “sometimes they wept, sometimes they mourned … then sat silent, hand in hand”. The one son to survive babyhood, who was carried about “in a little coach drawn by Shetland ponies”, died aged 11.

There’s an impressive quantity of meticulous research on display here. But Queen Anne does read like rather an old-school, even Victorian, biography, with page after page compiled from the highlights of the protagonists’ letters.

In this sense it is definitive. What’s missing is a sense of the physicality of Anne’s world: the energy of Stuart London, the voices of her subjects beyond a small, aristocratic circle, and the context of her age’s changing ideas about behaviour, religion and science. Nevertheless, this is clearly the fullest, best and most sympathetic account of poor old Anne yet written.

Yesterday evening while filming out and about in Covent Garden (talking about seventeenth-century prostitutes, as one does) I met a very nice young man – articulate, enthusiastic, knew a lot about history – who said that he’d nearly-but-not-quite applied for a job as an Explainer at Kensington Palace.  ’Darn!’ I thought, ‘He would have been a good colleague.’ Anyway, maybe his loss is your gain, because there are LOTS of jobs going at the moment, including seasonal explaining jobs at Kensington. Please do apply!

‘Join the newly–transformed Kensington Palace in 2012!

Start date beginning of March 2012

After a major £12million transformation project, Kensington Palace will reopen this March with an innovative and exciting new visitor experience. As we enter this new chapter in our history we are looking for enthusiastic and engaging Explainers to join us in bringing the fascinating stories of Kensington Palace to life.

You will be part of an expert team delivering a warm and welcoming 5 star visitor experience to all visitors from the moment they enter the palace. You will have a passion for working with people, great communication skills and a flair for storytelling; you will use humour with confidence and have the presence to ‘hold court’ as you engage visitors from all over the world in the history of the palace’s impressive rooms.

We will also be looking for GCSE’s (or equivalent), experience in delivering excellent customer service, and a general knowledge of history. Languages skills would be an advantage.

If you’d like to be part of our Explainer Team, find out more and apply by visiting www.hrp.org.uk‘