Hilary mantel

Tuesday

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

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies wins Costa Book of the Year

Hilary Mantel has won the Costa Book Award of the Year for Bring up the Bodies. It saw off contenders: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner (the children’s book winner), The Innocents by Francesca Segal (the first novel award), The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (the poetry prize) and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot (winner of the best biography award, and the first graphic work to win a Costa prize). Mantel collected the prize fund of £30,000. Mantel’s win means that she has also secured a ‘literary treble’: Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award and Costa Book of the Year.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The Costa Book Awards make history

The Costa Book Awards has made its own history tonight by selecting, according to its press release, an all women shortlist* for the first time. Here are the category winners, each of whom bags £5,000: 1). Mary and Bryan Talbot win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a book that examines two father-daughter relationships: James Joyce and his daughter Lucia, and Mary Talbot’s relationship with her father, who was a James Joyce scholar. 2). Hilary Mantel takes the Costa Novel Award for Bring up the Bodies, the brilliant and demanding Booker winner about which quite enough has been written. 3). Francesca Segal’s The Innocents snaps up the Costa First Novel Award. It is

Tuesday

Hilary Mantel

Last Morning in Al Hamra – Shiva Naipaul Prize, 1987

The Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing was first awarded in 1987, and its first-ever winner was Hilary Mantel, who has since won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. Below is Hilary’s prize-winning piece on Saudi Arabia; the judges ‘particularly admired her ability to convey not only the discovery of a culture new to her but also the distaste which the discovery aroused’, said then-editor of The Spectator Charles Moore. To learn more about the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and how you can enter, click here. To read Hilary Mantel’s recent blog on what winning the prize meant to her, click here. Last Morning in Al Hamra

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Be ‘unafraid’, Hilary Mantel tells Shiva Naipaul Prize contenders

Hilary Mantel has just been long-listed for the Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies, her brilliant follow-up to Wolf Hall, which netted the coveted Booker itself in 2009. We at The Spectator can’t trumpet this enough – you see, Hilary was the first-ever winner of our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in 1987. The prize, awarded for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer’, is named after the author of Fireflies and North of South, the late younger brother of VS Naipaul. In 2007, we thought we’d be giving our last-ever Shiva Naipaul award, but we have decided to revive the annual prize, which this year will be judged by