Event: Treasures Gallery at the Natural History Museum

Location: Natural History Museum, SW7

The Treasures Gallery is a new space in the Natural History Museum that will display 22 of the most valuable and extraordinary specimens from the museum’s vast collection. Each item has been picked for the story it has to tell and its value to fields of botany, mineralogy, palaeontology or zoology.

Event: Judi Dench and Jude Law in Michael Grandage theatre company

Location: Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

The theatre director Michael Grandage is putting on five plays in the first season of his newly formed Michael Grandage Company. The first offering from the new theatre company will star Jude Law, Dame Judi Dench and Daniel Radcliffe among others in a 15-month West End season at the Noel Coward Theatre.

It begins with Privates on Parade by Peter Nichols (Dec 2012 – Mar 2013) starring Simon Russell Beale as a cross-dressing captain in the army theatre unit during the Malayan Emergency.

Event: Lights, Camera, London! at the London Film Museum

Location: London Film Museum: Covent Garden, WC2

London takes centre stage in the year long Lights! Camera! London! exhibition, held at the London Film Museum in Covent Garden.

The exhibition about London’s place in film history covers both the city’s film industry and London as featured on the screen.

One section of the exhibit looks at the history of the city’s film industry from the studios of the early years (there were around 90 in the industry’s heyday) to today’s work in the post-production houses in Soho working on films such as X-Men and Harry Potter.

Event: Man Ray at the National Portrait Gallery

Location: National Portrait Gallery, WC2

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Man Ray Portraits opens in February with more than 150 photographs by the American artist, the majority of which have never been displayed in Britain before.

The exhibition covers Man Ray’s career between 1916 and 1968 with pictures on loan from major museums and private collections, including the Pompidou Centre, the Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, with special loans from the Man Ray Trust Archive.

Event: Roy Lichtenstein at the Tate Modern

Location: Tate Modern, SE1

The Tate Modern’s Roy Lichtenstein retrospective brings together 125 of the artist’s paintings and sculptures for the first retrospective in over 20 years. The New York artist was known for his comic-strip style pop art, hallmark Benday dots and advertising imagery showing the melodrama of American life.

This is the most comprehensive exhibition of Lichtenstein’s work, with 13 rooms of his paintings covering his career from his famous scenes of war, romance and anxious heroines, such as Whaam! and Drowning Girl both from 1963.