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Title details for Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel - Available

Mantel Pieces

Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

by Hilary Mantel
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A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 1, 2020

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780008429980

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780008429980
      • File size: 5242 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from October 15, 2020
      Adroit essays from the two-time Man Booker Prize-winning novelist. From the late 1980s, Mantel has contributed reviews, essays, and memoirs to the London Review of Books on topics that range from Madonna to Robespierre, from playwright John Osborne's "ferociously sulky" memoir to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and including a hefty dose of the Tudors. Interspersed with the essays are ephemera: brief letters to the journal's doting editors, especially Mary-Kay Wilmers, to whom Mantel once confessed having "critic's block"; postcards, emails (her own email address is redacted); and covers of the LRB that announce her contributions. The collection, then, serves as much as a display of Mantel's shrewd eye and stylish prose as a testimony to her long, fruitful association with the LRB. Her reviews are capacious, erudite, well informed, and exacting. "To accept an untruth, to assent to a lazy version of history, is not just negligent but immoral," she writes in praise of Charles Nicoll's book on the death of Christopher Marlowe. Likewise, she sees in historian John Demos' work about a woman taken captive by Mohawks "an exercise in scrupulous scholarship and imaginative sympathy." Admitting a "penchant for regicides," malice, and a bit of gore, Mantel has been drawn to books on the doomed and the damned: Marie Antoinette, Jane Boleyn, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Helen Duncan, a woman condemned for witchcraft in Britain in 1944. Besides being a revelatory examination of class, desire, and the phenomenon of spiritualism, Malcolm Gaskill's book on Duncan, Mantel writes, "is also in a wider sense an inquiry into 'how we know the things we know' and how what we can know or choose to know is circumscribed by our culture." That inquiry, of course, underlays her own forays into the past, including her memories: first meeting her stepfather, living in Saudi Arabia for several years, and suffering hallucinations after protracted recovery from surgery. A captivating collection.

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Languages

  • English

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