
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books (Hardback)
Hilary Mantel (author)Published: 01/10/2020

Covering everything from Tudor biography to the Virgin Mary with precision, flair and wit, this collection of Hilary Mantel’s essays and reviews for the London Review of Books pulsates with originality and insight.
From the twice Booker Prize winner and internationally bestselling Hilary Mantel, a collection of writing – essays, book reviews, memoir – from over thirty years contributing to the London Review of Books
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.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008429973
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 460 g
Dimensions: 222 x 141 x 32 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Praise for The Wolf Hall Trilogy:
'A masterpiece . . . Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century' - Observer
'An epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians. We are lucky to have it.' - Telegraph
'A masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future.' - Guardian
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“An excellent collection of essays”
This was an excellent collection of reviews, essays and personal pieces by Mantel written for the London Review of Books. I had ordered this as soon as announced as Mantel is my favourite writer.
Her wit is...
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“Review written after a very lengthy reading”
Mantel Pieces
This book certainly contained much well-researched detail and a great deal of personal faxes to her publishing contacts. Those contacts did not enhance the quality of the books details and I found them...
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