Hilary Mantel was the author of nine novels and three collections of short stories in addition to her prize-winning trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. She began to write for the LRB in 1987 and contributed more than fifty pieces to the paper on subjects ranging from some of the Tudors who appear in her trilogy (Jane Boleyn, Queen Mary, Charles Brandon and Margaret Pole) to some of the figures who appear in A Place of Greater Safety, her novel about the French Revolution: Danton, Robespierre (twice), Théroigne de Méricourt and Marie Antoinette. Royal Bodies, her Winter Lecture for the LRB, considered the public perception of royal women from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton: ‘we don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them.’ She also published several pieces of memoir in the LRB, on her childhood, the misdiagnosis of her endometriosis as mental illness, and the childlessness that was its result. Mantel Pieces: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing for the London Review of Books was published by Fourth Estate in 2020.
Hilary Mantel reads her short story, ‘The School of English’.
Hilary Mantel delivers her lecture on the royal body, from Anne Boleyn’s ‘bosom not much raised’ to Kate Middleton’s equally modest endowment.
At moments Mantel might have heeded the words addressed by her Wyatt to Cromwell: ‘Be careful . . . You are on the brink of explaining yourself.’
Bring Up the Bodies is not just a historical novel. It’s a novel with a vision of history that magically suits the period it describes. Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what...
There was no shortage of bastards in the early 16th century, but Thomas Cromwell stands out as one of the biggest bastards of them all. His surviving correspondence shows the energy, efficiency...
Hilary Mantel’s dark, unsettling and gleefully tasteless new novel about spiritualism, Hell and the condition of contemporary England is part ghost story, part mystery, and as alarmingly...
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Women of my age, born in the early Fifties and now in our forties, have reached the season of retrospection. We have become – or have not become – wives, wage-earners, mothers,...
‘If God knows our ends, why cannot he prevent them, why is the world so full of malice and cruelty, why did God make it at all and give us free will if he knows already that some of us will...
When Sarah Orne Jewett sent her friend Henry James a copy of her latest work, a historical novel entitled The Tory Lover, he told her it would take a very long letter to ‘disembroil the...
It’s not long since the fairy story seemed the least political of genres. Not so today. A preoccupation with transformation and escape, coupled with a repudiation of the sober certainties...
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