'We're all strange inside'

Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

Hilary Mantel

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next.

Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain’s last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, ‘Royal Bodies’, which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman.

Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.

Reviews of Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

    • Reviews for The Wolf Hall Trilogy:
    • ‘A masterpiece . . . Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century’ Observer
    • ‘An epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians. We are lucky to have it.’ Telegraph
    • ‘A masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future.’ Guardian

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