That’s it. We’re putting a wrap on 2010. We’ll hit the ground running again on Monday. But, until then, we leave you with a handy list of our favorite and most popular posts from 2010, all ordered in a rather random way.

Classic… This fruity sketch just aired on the BBC program The One Ronnie. Great work by Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield.

It’s no secret. We love to highlight vintage video of cultural icons. This weekend, we showed you the last days of Leo Tolstoy to commemorate the centennial of the great writer’s death, and you expressed your appreciation.

To commemorate Banned Books Week, the always great Internet Archive has opened up access to 74 banned books. The collection features some serious pieces of literature (James Joyce’s Ulysses, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Huxley’s Brave New World, etc.

Matthew Might, a computer science professor at the University of Utah, writes: “Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It’s hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures.” Here it goes.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union.  The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual lists.

Writing in The Guardian earlier this month, Christopher Hitchens revisited Animal Farm, George Orwell’s “dystopian allegorical novella” that took aim at the corruption of the Soviet Union and its totalitarian rule.

Couldn’t let you down. Couldn’t let the year end without giving you a “best of” list. So here it goes. A purely subjective list. 25 items. Some educational; some a little more entertaining; some popular, etc. I hope you enjoy, and you can always search through our complete archive here.

Today, we’re rolling out a sizable collection of Free eBooks, most of them classics, that features major works written by James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Nietzsche and others. (We have even thrown in a little Paulo Coelho.

Every now and then, we like to remind readers of the audio/video resources that Open Culture makes available to lifelong learners. These collections are all free, and can be downloaded to your computers and mp3 players. When you add it all together, you will find thousands of hours of free educational content here from quality sources.