What attracts an author to their subject? In the case of Lucy Worsley’s new biography of Agatha Christie you don’t have to look far for an answer. Worsley has been a fan of Christie’s murder mysteries since she was a child — they were “a kind of treat at the start of the school holidays”, she says. “I used to have this rule that I wouldn’t read for more than three hours continuously on any given day because even then, at 11, I sort of knew that it wasn’t quite normal.”
Worsley, 48, whose official title is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, is a regular fronting history programmes on television. She has a gift for making history fun by recounting the grislier details and