Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

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.

• Hot on the heels of the publication of The Mirror & the Light, the publishing event of recent memory, a stunning collection of writing from double Booker Prize winner and one of the world’s greatest living writers

• These essays and pieces of memoir, from over thirty years of writing for the London Review of Books, show Hilary Mantel to be one of our most profound and sometimes provocative thinkers and commentators

• Combined English Language sales of The Wolf Hall Trilogy are over 5 million

• Includes ‘Royal Bodies’, which caused a media sensation, and Prime Minister David Cameron to step off a plane in India and declare Hilary Mantel as ‘completely misguided and completely wrong’

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