Hilary mantel

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

Like Isis, Thomas More believed passionately in burning people alive

Next week, in the final episode of the BBC’s Wolf Hall, we’ll see Anne Boleyn face death by beheading. But if you watched last night’s episode, you’ll know – accurately – that in her final months, she grew to fear something far worse, death by burning. It was a real option, offered to Henry VIII’s discretion after her conviction for adultery. And she wasn’t the only queen threatened with this fate; in 1546, traditionalist Stephen Gardiner (played in Wolf Hall with pantomime villainy by Mark Gatiss), attempted to persuade Henry to order the arrest of his ultra-Protestant sixth wife, Katherine Parr, on heresy charges that would have carried the same penalty. I saw

David Blackburn

Hilary Mantel’s sympathy for the royals

Hilary Mantel has got into hot-water over a piece she has written about monarchy for the London Review of Books. There has been consternation over Mantel’s statement that the Duchess of Cambridge: ‘appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile… [who] seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.’ She went on to say that Kate used to be ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

David Cameron should have read Hilary Mantel’s essay before criticising it

How stupid of David Cameron to join this absurd row over Hilary Mantel’s-speech-turned-LRB-essay on monarchy. I strongly suspect that the Prime Minister was told to do so by aides, who for their part had been reading various journalists on the subject, who for their part hadn’t actually read the essay at all. They just all mouthed off because they wanted a little outrage to fill the day, and LRB’s provocative cover has (cleverly, perhaps) given them an excuse. Anyone with more than three brain cells who bothers to read the bloody thing will see that it is in fact an odd – albeit electrifyingly brilliant – ramble about our understanding of monarchy and how the public images of our Queens and Kings are

David Blackburn

The battle for credibility: David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Hilary Mantel edition

Why can’t politicians resist the temptation to comment? Hilary Mantel’s piece in the LRB is about as political as the pasta I was eating when David Cameron stopped darkening Indian doors for a moment to make what political strategists and pundits term “an intervention” on the matter. What possessed him (and Ed Miliband, who followed him into the mad breach)? The question is best answered, I think, by Peter Oborne in The Rise of Political Lying and much of his other writing. Oborne describes how political reality has changed. There was a time, at least in theory, when politics was determined by arguments over a verifiable truth; but this has

Thursday

Carola Binney

History is the art of making things up. Why pretend otherwise?

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’. listen to ‘David Starkey on Wolf Hall’ on audioBoom But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the

Thursday

Kate Maltby

Wolf Hall, BBC Two, review: ‘actually rather good’

It starts in darkness. And no, it’s not a metaphor for the crooked timber of the human heart, it’s just bad lighting. Stanley Kubrick sourced his cameras from NASA in order to capture candlelight in his eighteenth-century epic Barry Lyndon; director Peter Kosminsky’s techniques in Tudor drama Wolf Hall seem decidedly sublunary by comparison. And it’s not just the odd interior scene: twilight, candlelight, or moonlight, a nation of viewers tuned into learn about Henry VIII’s Great Matter and instead spent the opening credits frantically ascertaining how to adjust our TV dials. But if all I’ve got to kvetch about is colour contrast, it’s because as a story, Wolf Hall’s opening episode last night was

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Without childhood traumas, how did Alan Bennett ever become a writer?

‘So — take heart,’ said Alan Bennett, sending us out from his play, Cocktail Sticks, on a cheery note. The treatment for cancer had been gruelling, but that was 15 years ago, so… This Radio 4 production was adapted (and produced) by Gordon House from the stage version at the National Theatre but was perfectly made for radio, a monologue interrupted by dramatic scenes that take us back into Bennett’s childhood. Why, he wonders, is there nothing from that past for him to write about — no trauma, no deprivation, no disappointment? Surely, his parents could have done more to help him become a writer? With anyone else this would

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Ever wondered what Joan of Arc’s breasts were like? Wonder no more

Just as she arrived a bit late to the Hundred Years War – about three quarters of the way through – Joan of Arc takes a while to appear in historian Helen Castor’s biography. In fact she only turns up, with a small band of men, on page 86 in Chinon, the bolt hole of the king, when he’s apparently on the verge of quitting France because it had all got too much. Given that he was originally third in line, had been in opposition to his slightly simple father, Charles VI, le bien-aimé, and was now fighting his mother, Henry V of England, as well as the Burgundians who had

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

It’s about time a man won the Booker again

I bet fifty quid on Howard Jacobson winning the Man Booker. My original bet was actually on a ‘Yes’ vote below 40 per cent in the Scottish referendum and Bet365 then gave me £100 to bet on something else. I spent half of it on Jacobson and the other half on the Conservatives winning the last by-election. The less said on that the better. My reasoning for plumping for Jacobson made more sense. Anti-semitism is in fashion at the moment, so a novel about a mysterious holocaust seems timely; he’s a tried and tested literary heavyweight, so there’d be no accusations of dumbing down; and he’s a man – and after wins from Hilary Mantel and Eleanor

Sunday

Kate Maltby

Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: ‘a major theatrical event – don’t settle for one, see both’

In Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England, it never stops raining. As she writes in her evocative programme note for the RSC stage adaptation of  Wolf Hall, she first envisaged the life of Henry VIII’s political fixer, Thomas Cromwell, as ‘a room: the smell of wood smoke, ink, wet dogs and wet wool, and the steady patter of rain’. I’d heard, correctly, that Jeremy Herrin’s production was every bit as close and claustrophobic as Mantel’s novel. So as I set off, it seemed a disadvantageous prospect to spend a day of blazing summer sunshine cooped up with six hours of theatre, reviewing the double bill of Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies.

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

New literary award launches. But is the Folio Prize just a pretentious version of the Booker?

The British Library isn’t the first place I associate with contemporary fiction. For me, it’s about the Tudor manuscripts: the support and expertise of the manuscript room staff is second to none, and to the academic mind, few thrills compare to finding Elizabeth I’s distinctive handwriting on an unexpected document, or deciphering treacherous correspondence in a prayer book. But DBC Pierre it sure ain’t. Yet under the alert leadership of Roly Keating, the man who put BBC Four on the map, the British Library is now carefully fostering a commitment to living writers, not merely the dusty and dead. In a masterstroke of curation, when I leave the manuscript room,

Thursday

Leanda De-Lisle

The Thomas Cromwell plays would be stronger if they made him weaker 

Three things you might not expect of the RSC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. First, Mike Poulton’s plays have some great jokes. Laugh-your-head-off funny, you might say. Second, although Tom, Dick and Mary tell me they found Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies a more enjoyable read, Wolf Hall is the better play. Finally, the reinvention of the brutal Thomas Cromwell as someone you would have liked is, in the plays, a source of weakness as much as strength. Not that these are weak plays: six hours is a long time to spend on a theatre seat, yet I would happily see these plays back-to-back again tomorrow. They are beautifully

Thursday

Matthew Walther

Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor – review

‘She wrote fiction?’ Even today, with the admirable ladies at Virago nearly finished reissuing her dozen novels, Elizabeth Taylor remains mostly unknown except to fellow novelists, literary journalists, worthier publishing types, and a handful of dedicated readers. Even Nicola Beauman felt obliged to call her wonderful 2009 biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor so as to avoid confusion with the overrated actress whose debut film, National Velvet, was released only a few months prior to the publication of Taylor’s first novel. It cannot help her reputation that she had a majority of her papers burned, produced no journalism and kept her distance from literary London, writing only to friends such as

Mike Poulton

How to think like Chekhov or Turgenev

I recently met an A-level English student who had never heard of Pontius Pilate. How is it possible to reach the age of 18 — to be applying to university to read English and European Literature — and never to have come across the man who asked the unanswerable question: what is truth? This student had completed a course in theatre studies, having read hardly any Shakespeare, nor any of his contemporaries, none of the Greeks — Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides — nothing from the Restoration, no Ibsen, no Shaw, and certainly no Schiller — though he had been given the role of Hippolytus in a school production of Phaedra’s Love,

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Sex! Soap! Starkey! The Tudor invasion of British television

The Tudors have invaded television. Everywhere you look, it’s Henry VIII this, Henry VII that, Anne Boleyn this, Anne of Cleves that. On BBC2 is the continuing drama series The Tudors, whose Henry VIII looks like the lead singer in a boy band who’s stumbled on to the wrong film set. At any moment, you expect him to announce the execution of Anne Boleyn with those jabbing-the-air hand gestures that boy-band members use to semaphore emotion. Lushly soap operatic, The Tudors depicts the royal court not so much as a place of high political intrigue but as a hearth for dynastic family troubles where improbably good-looking people have lots of

Wednesday

David Blackburn

AM Homes’ May We Be Forgiven wins the Women’s Fiction Prize

AM Homes’ May We Be Forgiven has won the Women’s Fiction Prize, beating a strong field that included Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver and Kate Atkinson. Homes, who is an American writer, is something of an unknown in this country (certainly compared to Smith and Mantel). On receiving the prize, she said, ‘it’s my nature to think about big ideas and my gender shouldn’t prevent me from doing that.’ Her work concerns modern America. Sleepy academic types are disturbed. The normal vanishes. Homes has been compared to Jonathan Franzen, among others. Click here to find out if the comparison is an insult to Homes, an insult to Franzen, or simply a fair observation.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Stop shouting at Hilary Mantel – there are real outrages to address

It started the other week, when David Cameron was in India. Although it started like a bout of malaria starts, so I suppose the more precise term would be ‘recurred’. There he is in Amritsar, touring the site of a massacre, possibly in that hat. And all Britain wants to know is what he thinks about what Hilary Mantel thinks about the Duchess of Cambridge. What, I thought to myself, the hell is wrong with us? It’s a pretty expansive ‘us’, this, and it includes Cameron himself. ‘Actually, I haven’t read it,’ he should have said when asked, thousands of miles away, about an essay in the London Review of Books,

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — the battle for Eastleigh and free riding the NHS

The Tories and Lib Dems are locking horns in Eastleigh but what is Labour’s strategy? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth debates with the Fabian Society’s Marcus Roberts on how Labour is working to regain long-lost voters in the South East, as well as their aims for this by-election. We also examine this week’s Spectator cover on what Eastleigh says about the health of the coalition. Mary Wakefield joins to discuss the next big NHS scandal — the abuse of access to treatment. Does anyone track access to NHS services? Do doctors care about who patients are and can anything be done about it? Freddy Gray also explains why we

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Hilary Mantel’s misinterpreted Royal Bodies lecture was still unpleasant

People are quite often pilloried for saying the opposite of what they actually said. I have read Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture, and she is quite clearly not attacking the Duchess of Cambridge, but criticising what it is that people try to turn royal women into. When she speaks of the Duchess as ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung’, or ‘the spindles of her limbs’ being ‘hand-turned and gloss-varnished’, she is talking about what the media and public opinion want of her. She discusses appearance, and offers no opinion about the young woman’s reality. She is sympathising with a female predicament, and she does the same about

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Hilary Mantel did not attack Kate, she defended her.

Like grief, stupidity has a hierarchy. So, on balance, Ed Miliband’s response – if it can be so dignified – to Hilary Mantel’s essay about the mystery and magic attraction of royalty was even dumber than David Cameron’s. Neither, plainly, had read what Mantel had written. The Leader of the Opposition at least had the advantage of playing second. Having seen the Prime Minister make a chump of himself, Miliband would have been wise to resist the temptation to demonstrate his own chump credentials. This was beyond him. In modern British politics you cannot allow the existence – or even mere appearance – of a Chump Gap. Then again, it