2 h. ago The BBC faces backlash for using AI Agatha Christie to flog a £79 writing course

The BBC have been branded 'exploitative ghouls' for using an AI Agatha Christie to flog a £79 course for wannabe crime novelists.

Economics

6 h. ago Agatha Christie to be resurrected by AI to teach writing course nearly 50 years after her death

Aspiring writers will be able to learn through Christie’s own words using her voice and image

Events

16 h. ago Moment heritage campaigner is attacked by 'developer' at a historic Agatha Christie garden in planning row over 'demolition' of cottage

David Redman, 62, says he was left with a missing tooth after the alleged confrontation with a developer outside Singleton Gardens in Torquay, Devon.

Events

24 h. ago BBC harnesses AI to create writing classes given by Agatha Christie

Videos will share the author’s tips on everything from story structure and plot twists to the art of suspenseAspiring crime writers now have the chance to be taught by “Agatha Christie”, thanks to a course of online video lessons by BBC Maestro. The videos “starring” the author, who died in 1976, have been made using AI-enhanced technology, licensed images and carefully restored audio recordings.Videos made using a reconstruction of Christie’s voice will share tips on everything from story structure and plot twists to the art of suspense. The writing advice has been drawn directly from her writings and archival interviews and curated by the leading Christie scholars Dr Mark Aldridge, Michelle Kazmer, Gray Robert Brown and Jamie Bernthal-Hooker. Continue reading...

Politics

25 h. ago Agatha Christie brought 'back from the dead' in astonishing new BBC venture

The venture to create a virtual version of the world’s best-selling author is part of a 'first of its kind' deal struck between the Agatha Christie Estate and BBC Maestro

Events

61 h. ago ‘You have to be taken inside Poirot’s brain’: Ken Ludwig on the secret to adapting Agatha Christie

The US playwright and anglophile behind much-revived comedies has a flair for crime and is following a crowd-pleasing Murder on the Orient Express with Death on the NileIf you ever face a quiz question about the most performed theatre writers in the world, likely to have a play on somewhere every day, William Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Agatha Christie are all reliable answers but a fourth may surprise you: Ken Ludwig. He also has intriguing connections with the other three.The popularity that made the American wealthy enough to have donated £1m to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is partly due – apart from his own much-revived comedies, Lend Me a Tenor (1986) and Moon Over Buffalo (1995) – to Christie. Ludwig’s 2017 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express has had hundreds of productions and is currently touring the UK. We meet when he is in London for a workshop on a second Hercule Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which premieres in September. Continue reading...

Politics

5 d. ago The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: goodbye to all that | Editorial

Would the legendary American writer have welcomed the publication of her therapy notes? It seems unlikelyJoan Didion entered the fray on the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s unfinished final manuscript in an essay titled Last Words in 1998: “You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t,” she wrote. You believe a writer’s unpublished work is fair game after their death or you don’t, and Didion – it would seem – didn’t.Debate about the ethics of posthumous publication has been ignited once more, this time with Didion at its centre. After the writer’s death in 2021, about 150 pages were found in a file next to her desk. These were meticulous accounts of sessions with her psychiatrist, from 1999 to 2003, focused mainly on her adopted daughter Quintana, who was spiralling into alcoholism. Addressed to her husband, screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, this journal has been published under the title Notes to John. “No restrictions were put on access,...

Politics

9 d. ago Mick Jagger's ex Marianne Faithfull leaves just £35k after not writing a will

Former model and singer Marianne Faithfull left just £35,000 behind as it's revealed she did not write a will prior to her sad death this year

Economics

1 week ago Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story review – richly bittersweet portrait of an Irish literary great

The dizzy highs and painful lows of the late writer’s life are laid bare in Sinéad O’Shea’s moving documentaryHer raw, sexually and emotionally frank prose made her a sensation and got the Irish Catholic church hot under the cassock. She was an eloquent wit, a provocateur who could hold her own in literary circles and in the glittering party circuit of 1960s London. It’s now widely acknowledged that she was one of the greats of Irish literature. But the slightly bitter aftertaste left by this otherwise richly enjoyable documentary portrait of the writer Edna O’Brien comes from the decades of bullying and ridicule she had to endure before her talent was fully recognised.Much of it originated uncomfortably close to home: Blue Road, which features interviews with the 93-year-old O’Brien shortly before her death last year, tells of her tumultuous marriage to fellow writer Ernest Gébler, who was not a man able to graciously accept the fact that his wife’s success had eclipsed his own. Je...

Politics

3 w. ago Our favourite debut writers out this month: Veronika Dapunt, Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin, Claire Gleeson

Sara Lawrence reviews the best debuts books out now.

Politics