Classicist and museum trustee visited the line after people complained of waiting for hours, with some turned away

Mary Beard has intervened in the row about excessively long queues for the Bayeux tapestry by visiting the line and submitting a list of improvements to the British Museum.

Beard, 71, is a trustee of the museum and inspected the queue herself after visitors to the tapestry complained that they had to wait for hours for their turn to view it, and some were turned away with no guarantee they would get another time slot.

The summer’s most anticipated film will raise epic questions about culture wars, classics and the nature of film-making

In a plot twist worthy of the ancient bards themselves, the hottest movie of the summer isn’t a superhero flick, or an alien-invasion yarn, or a crinolines-and-bonnets period drama. Instead, it is an adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, which film-maker Christopher Nolan is releasing as a follow-up to Oppenheimer, his grim, Oscar-winning study of the origins of nuclear war. Nolan, previously director of Memento, the Dark Knight trilogy and Dunkirk, has now turned his attention to the Odyssey, the classical Greek saga that, along with its companion epic the Iliad, is one of the foundational works of western civilisation.

Nolan’s adaptation is a big-budget affair, the largest of his career at an estimated $250m, and the director has peopled it with a cast ranging from established Hollywood stars such as Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, newer teen-friendly faces including couple of the moment Zendaya and Spider-Man’s Tom Holland, and idiosyncratic choices such as Lupita Nyong’o, Mia Goth, Samantha Morton and fellow director Benny Safdie.

Tracy Chevalier announces registration scheme at the London Book Fair as AI works flood market

The Society of Authors (SoA) has launched a scheme to help identify works written by humans in a market increasingly flooded by AI-generated books.

The scheme is the first of its kind launched by a UK trade association, and allows authors to register their books and download a “Human Authored” logo to display on their back cover.