It is “cosy”, in a sense, when the old lady detective Miss Marple says – over a cup of tea – that it is always best to think the worst of human nature, since the worst so often turns out to be the truth At the same time it is not cosy at all. It is frighteningly realistic, shockingly so in an age like ours, intent as it is upon positivity: the benign, unyielding morality that runs through Agatha Christie’s books is not at all the kind of thing we go in for today. For her own part, I would venture, she would scarcely have approved the sympathetic treatment that tonight’s film of Sparkling Cyanide gives to the murderous culprit.Which is why updating is problematical. We are wary of her steely structures; we are equally nervous of her worldly wisdom.

And yet: imagine what could be done with a book like And Then There Were None Imagine it adapted seriously, stylishly. Not with the characters turned into PR girls and coke-snorters but into – dare one try this? – real, complex human beings The books, as I say, can take it. I should also say that they deserve it.’Sparkling Cyanide’, ITV 1, 9pm, today. Laura Thompson is author of ‘Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford – A Portrait of A Contradicitory Woman’ (Review £20). Four years ago Robert Hughes had a terrible road accident His bones were crushed; he nearly lost his life. Curiously, there is a link between that personal calamity and this new monograph on Goya, Spain’s greatest painter.

Hughes had been struggling for years to write a book about Goya The ability to do so had eluded him For some reason he had simply been unable to break through. Could it, in part, have been something to do with the fact that so tantalisingly little is known about Goya’s life? It was much more than that. During that long period of hospitalisation, Goya visited him repeatedly, in dreams, taunting him for his failures: of will; of application; for the fact that he had the temerity to intrude upon his life. Wasn’t he wholly out of his depths?

Four years ago Robert Hughes had a terrible road accident His bones were crushed; he nearly lost his life. Wasn’t he wholly out of his depths?
And what did Goya look like in those dreams? He was young, a street tough, dressed in that bull fighter’s jacket he wears in an early self-portrait.