In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, ‘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 cover a wide range of subjects including Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia (where she lived in the 1980s), Britain’s last witch, the Virgin Mary and the pop icon Madonna, as well as pieces about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display Mantel’s insight into the Tudor mind.
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