Our island story | 11 February 2012

Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, on a radio programme that tells the history of the monarchy through 50 objects in the Royal Collection

A History of the World in 100 Objects managed to squeeze the great paradigm shifts of anthropology into the interval between the roadworks sign and the all-clear, spiriting away traffic cones with remote customs and belief systems. What could follow something so confidently global if not an examination of our own strange customs and belief systems — some introspective anthropology? The Art of Monarchy, though a history told through 50 objects in a single collection, is not intended as another History of the World, but the comparison allows us to imagine how our material–cultural footprint might be interpreted by some remote and future museum. The guide through the material, the BBC’s arts editor Will Gompertz, catches the amiable but probing bemusement that such a remote viewpoint might provoke.