Recent stories of note:
“Right royal style: 90 years of Queen Elizabeth II’s fashion to go on show at Buckingham Palace”
Louis Jebb, The Art Newspaper
The Royal Collection Trust will open the exhibition “Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style” at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in London in spring 2026, reports Louis Jebb in The Art Newspaper. The Queen’s fashion helped shape the late monarch as a symbol for constancy. Jebb writes that “she had, as she once quipped, to be seen to be believed.” Shedding light on her fashion through the many decades of her reign, the exhibition will include some two hundred pieces, including her 1947 wedding dress and her 1953 coronation dress. It will also present the dresses that the monarch wore at foreign state dinners, emphasizing the role of the Queen in soft-power diplomacy. Additionally, the exhibit will illustrate how her fashion changed with the advent of color television in the 1960s, and it will indicate how it responded to crises like COVID-19.
“Should we make Classics history?”
Edmund Stewart, The Critic
In What is Ancient History?, the historian of Roman history Walter Scheidel argues that classics should be abolished as a discipline and replaced by “global” or “foundational” ancient history. Edmund Stewart responds in The Critic that Scheidel’s proposals would fail to fix any of the supposed problems with the field of study and would rob it of its breadth and richness. While Scheidel takes issue with the privileged place that Greek and Roman societies occupy in scholarship, Stewart responds that the classical texts we return to time and again are exceptional, and writes, “enthusiasm may at least cause less harm, and prompt more good, than cynicism.” He argues that “there is something peculiarly joyless and authoritarian” about “global classics,” which would deprive the study of classical civilizations of a holistic understanding of language, philosophy, and literature, and that the content of the discipline should be its own defense.
“‘Too Good to Be Altogether Lost’ Review: Back to the Little House”
Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) has become a target for cancel culture, writes Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books, Pamela Smith Hill encourages book lovers to look beyond the edicts of “sensitivity readers” and to appreciate anew Wilder’s semi-autobiographical chronicle of prairie life in the nineteenth century. Hill addresses “problematic” elements such as the prejudicial attitudes toward Native Americans expressed by certain characters in the Little House books. Too Good to Be Altogether Lost points out that modern readers should be able to differentiate between the narrator’s voice and those of the characters and that the offending lines are taken out of context. Hill also addresses a mystery that has beguiled fans of Wilder—why the final book in the Little House series, the posthumously published The First Four Years, is so tonally distinct from the rest of the series.
