Wonderful, exuberant stories spill out in these honest tales of lives genuinely transformed by literature – while Queen Camilla has an off-with-their-heads moment

You have to love a documentary in which Queen Camilla reveals that as a teenager one of her favourite books was The Scarlet Pimpernel because “I was sort of obsessed at that time by the guillotine”. ’I’m sorry, what? Could we back up a moment? I have a few more questions I’d like to ask.

Alas, she goes on to refer to the tricoteuses in A Tale of Two Cities as “ghastly women”, so hopes of Camilla’s coronation as the end of a very long seditious play by the Shands are ultimately dashed. But if anyone was ever going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent primed to bring down the monarchy from within, it would be Camilla. Clearly born the very gamest of girls, she has a gleam in her eye as she recalls her younger self that still makes you wonder …

Article in Atlantic claims The Blue Fighter was artificially generated, days after it won Caine prize for African writers

The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated.

Kundizeza’s story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: “Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI.”

Christopher Gardner, the author of Food Sense and director of nutrition studies at Stanford, says we have overcomplicated the question of what to eat

Finally, some good news: eating well is more straightforward than you think. “There’s a lot of good science out there, and it mostly agrees,” says Stanford University’s director of nutrition studies and professor of medicine Christopher Gardner from his office in Palo Alto – beaming, bronzed and the picture of health.

In the age of social media and wellness grift, we’ve overcomplicated the question of what to eat, he says.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a time-travelling fantasy novel to an eclectic essay collection. Discuss what you’re reading in paperback in the comments

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Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe

Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.

Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

Emily Brontë’s classic is reimagined with extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings but plays it straight

Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.

As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.

There are shades of JG Ballard in this tale of survival in a decaying metropolis, but big ideas and lengthy exposition crowd out the human drama

Hernan Diaz’s last novel, the formally inventive Trust, narrated the biography of a successful financier from four different viewpoints to investigate themes of memory, representation, fiction and the fictitiousness of money. It was both critically and commercially successful and won the Pulitzer prize. His latest book, Ply, is a speculative epic set in a decaying city. While the time and location are never spelled out, the evidence strongly suggests a version of New York City several centuries into the future. A series of upheavals have depopulated this “shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur”.

There is more than a flavour of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World in the way the rewilded city is depicted: the lynx and deer stalking the streets, “the downtown swamp where the blind limbs and tendrils of trees and climbers have been at work for ages pulling the last line of collapsing buildings down into the spongy soil under the water”. Somewhere beyond the city, a more technologically sophisticated life endures. The evidence for this are the monopolistic companies Flow and Tensor, which control water and electricity respectively; and CTS, an unexplained acronym for a private security company that protects their interests and “holds a monopoly over monitoring and patrolling of the streets”.

The star takes us back to 70s New York to recount his breakthrough, and it’s a great yarn – but it’s laced with anger

The Philadelphia Museum of Art contains a 14th-century Buddhist temple, a one-acre sculpture garden and works by Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh. Its most famous attraction, however, is a flight of stone steps that draws several million tourists every year. These are the so-called “Rocky Steps”, immortalised by Sylvester Stallone in his 1976 movie about an underdog boxer who needs to build up his strength. The climb is a lung-busting challenge, but if unremarkable Rocky can sprint all the way to the top, he gives hope and encouragement to everyone down below.

It’s not just the fans who relate to Rocky Balboa. So too does Stallone, whose entertaining rags-to-riches memoir paints the creator and his creation as all but indivisible, each an extension of the other. Stallone was flat broke and beaten down when he wrote his film about “the forgotten man”, the blue-collar schlub with a good heart and firm chin. Everyone knows that Rocky is being set up as a fall guy. He can’t possibly defeat Apollo Creed, the dazzling, charismatic, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Except that Rocky doesn’t care, he only wants to be seen, and in scripting an unlikely redemptive arc for his hero, Stallone wound up transforming his own fortunes as well.

I had worked for 25 years, married and started a family. But a crisis at the supermarket reminded me there was something missing from my life

In 2021, at 42 years old, I had the reading age of a four-year-old. I had spent my life up to that point not being able to read and write, navigating the world with careful planning and the help of my wife. During the Covid lockdowns, however, the world turned upside down and my usual way of going through life exploded. My wife was home-schooling our 10-year-old son and I was ashamed to not be able to help; my usual work as a lorry driver was put on hold, and even simple tasks like shopping had become incredibly difficult.

I became overwhelmed one day in the supermarket aisles trying to find a milk that my wife and son could drink, since they are both allergic to dairy and soy. I worried I might poison them. It hit me that the way I had been living my life previously could not continue.

Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp paid £10k at auction for Epstein’s address book. He then used it to co-author a thrilling account of the swinging 60s – and an intimate portrait of a tormented man whose life was unravelling

The email from Sotheby’s might easily have gone unread. Despite his deep appreciation for the musical heroes who came before him, Gary Kemp is not a collector of rock memorabilia. But there, among the auction lots, was something that caught his eye: a 160x100mm black Twinlock binder that once belonged to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.

The listing detailed 57 pages containing 404 entries, many handwritten by Epstein himself, cataloguing the social and business network of the Liverpudlian impresario in 1967, the year of his death. Kemp immediately recognised this was much more than simply an address book: it was a who’s who of 60s London at its swinging peak, from David Bailey and David Frost to most of the Rolling Stones. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to have this. I’ve got to hold it,’” he says. “It’s got DNA on it.”