Hilary Mantel dominates the bank holiday books pages. Bring Up The Bodies, the sequel to the Booker winning Wolf Hall, will be published this Thursday, and the acclaim has already begun.
Mantel has been interviewed for the Telegraph by the renowned Tudor historian Thomas Penn. They talked of history and fiction, very carefully and very slowly: Penn says that Mantel speaks in ‘perfect paragraphs’. The Telegraph also carries an extract from Bring Up The Bodies. It has the searing pace and all the subtleties that characterised Wolf Hall. Cromwell travels to see Katherine of Aragon, and the two speak of the king’s latest woman problem, in this case Anne Boleyn’s childlessness. Katherine remarks, ‘A queen, and she calls herself a queen, must live and suffer under the world’s eye’ – a statement that resounds in the 21st century just as it did in the sixteenth, perhaps more so if the definition of queen is widened to include the stars of our society.
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