Mantel Pieces is a good book by author Hilary Mantel.
In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to editor Karl Miller. 20 reviews, essays and memoirs from the next three decades tell the story of what happened next.
Her subjects are varied: 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, an excellent study of Helen Duncan, England’s last witch. Essays on Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole offer startling insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from Wolf Hall’s best-selling Trilogy.
Her famous lecture, Royal Bodies, caused a media frenzy, exploring the place of royal women in our society and imagination. Some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and her confrontation with a powerful man in the circus. Mantel Pieces is an irresistible pick from one of our greatest living writers.
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Mantel Pieces
- Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
