Annoyingly glib, pop-trendy, staggeringly superficial, sensationalist, fanciful and frequently silly. An introvert who was uncomfortable with the spotlight, she was also reluctant naming herself as an author, no doubt due to her Victorian upbringing, when women of her station were not supposed to work for a living. Lucy Worsley is a brilliant detective into the letters, the emotion, the drive of Christie, the ambition.

Page 316: One of the advantages of being seventy is that you really don’t care any longer what anyone says about you. A new, fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from celebrated literary and cultural historian Lucy Worsley.Having seen the Lucy Worsley TV series I had gained knowledge of facets her life that I was not aware and I am also a great lover of the Christie films and TV series. The trap the biographer can so easily fall into is the 'heroification' of the subject, and unfortunately for Worsley, I think this is what happened to her. Lucy Worsley OBE is Chief Curator at the charity Historic Royal Palaces and also presents history documentaries for the BBC. And the title of this final book, taken from Greek myth, rightly suggests that Miss Marple has also become superhuman, a modern equivalent of the ancient goddess Nemesis, pre-patriarchal, inexorable. Also her own personalities coming to the fore when needed in the rapidly changing world and her own personal passage throughout her life.

You might also catch me presenting history films on the old goggle box, giving the talks on the cruise ship Queen Mary 2, or slurping cocktails. This feels like a stop-start narrative - it races along in jolly Lucy fashion until it gets bogged down in describing a house or a Christie relative, and then pulls itself out and goes bounding off again. Which I suppose, after reading my impressions of her, I'd hope to be described similarly after death.Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern. Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? To me (and I am by no means an expert) a good biography is an honest and stark depiction of the subject matter. What is not unexpected is the disdain levelled at her by male critics and directors*, who could not countenance a successful, forthright woman who enjoyed enormous, worldwide popularity for her writing. Agatha's described "Plutocratic Period" : After the dramatic aftermath of the 1926 disappearance and her subsequent divorce.