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“... come up. And what about women? Jeanette Winterson, not exactly unfamous, isn’t featured; nor is Hilary Mantel; though Zadie Smith inevitably is. Most published works of fiction are not particularly good, as has surely always been the case (and the situation must seem worse now, whenever now is, because the mediocrities of the past are soon remaindered ...”

“... comedy that surrounds Mark Smeaton’s fall points to another reason this book is so very good. Hilary Mantel has relaxed into the 16th century. There is less of the artful by-play with historical sources which ran through Wolf Hall – which was clever, but risked in-jokes – and there is less of the slight over diligence about the historical record ...”

“... it’s an unnerving reminder that home is where the horror is. In Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Hilary Mantel makes skilful use of thriller techniques, as a way of keeping us edgily involved with her heroine, who’s tense and lonely and anxiously trying to make sense of a world she fears, dislikes, and certainly doesn’t understand. Frances Shore’s ...”

“... 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 funny as it is disturbing. Shakespeare makes an appearance – he passes in the spirit world as ‘Wagstaffe’, something of a louche lad about town – and is caught on tape having a squabble with another spirit: Wagstaffe: This sceptred isle ...”

“... in exercising it?’ The question is put by Father Angwin, the non-believing priest in Fludd, Hilary Mantel’s short, black, funny novel about Roman Catholicism. Then he remembers that he doesn’t believe in God – an unusually quick solution to the Problem of Evil – and goes about his business, dispensing pieces of wisdom to his flock, thinking ...”

“... a lovely lad Rafa Nadal is I shall scream.’ ‘Don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating Hilary Mantel.’ ‘I don’t want to give a cool appraisal of Jeremy Irons … I just want to boil him in oil.’ She’s like Christ enthroned in a gilded Quattrocentro painting, attended by apostles, the legions of the damned at her feet: Marianne ...”

“... the end is a spirit guide, someone who knows what you can do, and takes pains alongside you. For Hilary Mantel,Mary-Kay has come for me to be one of the small shadowy group of ideal readers I think most writers have lurking, somewhere at the back of their minds, when they sit down to write. These watchers in the psyche are more important than almost ...”

“... Cardinal, His Life and Death is the only source explicitly recommended in the author’s note to Hilary Mantel’s new novel, which takes the story of Thomas Cromwell through the fall of Wolsey up to the execution of Thomas More in 1535. Cavendish himself fusses around the edges of the early stages of the book, a man preoccupied with table napkins and ...”

“... Time moves​ in a mysterious way. Wolf Hall, the first instalment of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, appeared more than a decade ago. Its 650 pages covered the years from roughly 1500 to 1535. Three years later came Bring Up the Bodies, which in 410 pages created a tight tragic narrative about Cromwell’s part in the fall of Anne Boleyn over the single year 1535-36 ...”

“... proud of its constant hunger for more. ‘Why are we so attached to the severities of the past?’ Hilary Mantel writes in Wolf Hall. ‘Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It’s not as if we had a ...”

“... relations takes over, and people defy their own natures, or the rules of their own stories. As Hilary Mantel put it in the LRB some years ago, reviewing Behind the Scenes at the Museum, ‘just when you think you have begun to understand how her book works, she will undeceive you.’In Jackson Brodie’s world, literary characters like Jackson Brodie ...”

“... Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one solace: the Independent on Sunday would be run by clear-eyed, yet idealistic ...”

“... Town, Kilburn. These places are frequented by other contemporary novelists like Margaret Forster, Hilary Mantel and Jeanette Winterson; two of them black humorists like Bainbridge, but none quite as funny, and certainly not as unexpected and disturbing. She is a cross between a witch and a clown. Clowns unleash chaos, and that is what she does. Unlike ...”

“... airing of an interview she did on the Today programme. There were appreciations and reflections by Hilary Mantel and Martin Amis (read by other friends) but her order of service concludes with the penultimate sentence from her memoir, Slipstream. ‘I’ve slowly learned some significant things,’ she wrote: ‘the importance of truth, which, it seems to ...”

“... moved to Chatto as their managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers and historians. She published Angela Carter’s last, whirling novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). (It was around this time she accepted my novel The Lost Father and ...”