The Round-Up: May 2026

A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits

Welcome to this month’s edition of the Round-Up! (For the newcomers—yes, the antiquated spelling is deliberate. No, if you know my writing style you are not surprised.)

• Earlier this month I did a just-for-fun post on Instagram with slides highlighting the amount of cast crossover between Jane Austen adaptations and the wonderful 1980s Miss Marple series starring Joan Hickson. A few days ago I was highly entertained to see that Jem Bloomfield had done practically the same thing here on Substack with Austen and John Le Carré adaptations—with far wittier captioning.

• Hannah Elizabeth at A Living Schoolroom undertakes the momentous task of ranking all the anthropomorphic animals of fiction, and offers up a cornucopia of classic P.G. Wodehouse quotations that should send you on a beeline to pick up the nearest Wodehouse book if you have never yet done so.

• At Y’allogy, Derrick Jeter shares a baker’s dozen of historically authentic-looking cowboy hats from film and television.

• A neat post from Hayley Solano at Her Literary Home on the lovely botanical wallpapers found in the homes of some famous authors. I can’t decide which one is my favorite.

• When I saw a recent Twitter thread on the homes of U.S. presidents, I noticed how very accurate the depiction of Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage had been in Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955). As it turns out, the exterior and front hallway scenes were actually filmed at the real Heritage.

• The latest British show my family has been enjoying on Prime Video is Penelope Keith’s Hidden Villages—a charming tour of villages all over England, Wales, and Scotland. It’s like seeing locations from the many British novels I’ve read, which I know mostly as names, come to life before my eyes. (The Lake District and the Cotswolds were my favorite, but I also liked Devon, Pembrokeshire, Royal Deeside, and the Yorkshire Dales.)

• Via an Instagram account that shares vintage photos from a variety of sources, I came across this neat collection of almost 500 photos, probably from the 1940s and ’50s, by photographer Hugh Stevens Bell—mostly Kodachrome with a few black-and-white, and largely of people and places in the American West, particularly the Southwest.

• Need a smile in your day? Try a peek at the Denali National Park puppy cam, where you can watch the newest litter of working sled dog puppies grow up in real time. They are just about at the cutest age right now and absolutely adorable.

• If you’re in search of some beautiful, classic choral arrangements of hymns, let me recommend Great Hymns of Faith by the St. Olaf Choir, volumes one and two.

I didn’t post any new fiction on here this month, being rather occupied in writing some new fiction, but here’s one from last summer which (apropos of this month’s Flyleaves post) is very Tarkington-inspired:

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