Queen Camilla

A school in Greater Manchester has stripped 193 books from its library because they are ‘inappropriate’, liable to upset pupils and thus a safeguarding risk. Among the dangerously destabilising material: Michelle Obama’s memoir and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who was entrusted with identifying these literary IEDs? An over-zealous head? A prurient librarian? A demented child psychologist? Nope. A humble AI bot. While writing my latest novel, The Hawk Is Dead, much of which is set in Buckingham Palace, I asked ChatGPT to produce a simple floor plan. Not a tough assignment – much less taxing than diagnosing nearly 200 books as existential threats to adolescent wellbeing. It got the Palace’s

Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. ‘There’s something so tactile about a book,’ she says. ‘I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…’ The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as she can remember. She says her father, Bruce Shand, inspired this lifelong passion: ‘He read to us as children. He chose the books, and we listened. He was probably the best-read man I’ve come across anywhere. He devoured books.’ Bruce Shand was a soldier. His father was a writer, about architecture, food and wine. His