Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who oversaw Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace, is leaving his role Credit: DT Alexander Pope, the 18th-century satirist, is not, I confess, a poet I think about all that much. Yet, something he once wrote has stayed with me since studying his elegant yet cut-throat neoclassical couplets at university: “A little learning is a dang’rous thing”. That line, from “An Essay on Criticism” (1711), flashed into my mind upon hearing that the Royal Collection plans to hold “in abeyance” the time-honoured office of the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, a post established during the 17th century by that famously art-loving monarch, Charles I, following the departure of the current, charismatic incumbent, Desmond Shawe-Taylor.