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    Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
    Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
    Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
    Audiobook10 hours

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

    Written by Hilary Mantel

    Narrated by Olivia Dowd and Hilary Mantel - introduction

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 1, 2020
    ISBN9780008429997
    Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
    Author

    Hilary Mantel

    HILARY MANTEL was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.

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    Reviews for Mantel Pieces

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    • 4/5
      The pieces themselves are good, though they have an arch quality that her fiction doesn’t have.
      But the reader is not great — she doesn’t always pay attention to the sense of the sentence, so you get odd choices of emphasis, pauses in not quite the right place, etc. It’s quite distracting.
    • 5/5
      brilliant essays, I loved them, one of my favourites, shopping for a bookshelf in Jeddah!
    • 3/5
      A selection of reviews and other book related writings by Mantel that have appeared in the LRB over the years. I felt that she was always more engaging on the reviews of the books related to the Tudor period. At times she can be quite cutting and, without knowing if there is cause to be so, it can feel quite cruel. I'm not sure that this has necessarily inspired me to read more of her reviews, nor, if I'm honest, the books she was reviewing!
    • 4/5
      Excellent critical essays on a wide variety of subjects with fascinating contemporaneous facsimile copies of letters, postcards, faxes and emails written by Mantel to her editors at the London Review of Books.Other than the humour that runs through most of them, there is a particular interest in those essays which touch on a subject about which she has written; the French Revolution, mediums and naturally about the Tudors.There is also an acute care over language, for example in reviewing a book about Robespierre, she notes of the author that “It’s wise, though, to be careful with certain loaded terms: “mob” is not the collective noun for Parisians, and should not be applied to the curious spectators who came, in 1790, to stare at the royal family when they took the air in the gardens of the Tuileries.”I especially appreciated the humour of her 2010 essay Meeting the Devil, the description of Mantel’s operation gone wrong, the ability to write about the experience. I think that this has previously been published as Ink in the Blood, but can’t find my copy to confirm.As with Mantel herself, I thought that her essay, Royal Bodies, which famously refers to Kate Middleton but also many other royals, was broadly sympathetic to them as individuals. Although well expressed, it has nothing new to say about royalty itself, but was a meaningful exploration of Henry VIII and his wives.In the final essay about a biography of Margaret Pole by Susan Higginbotham, she writes of Higginbotham that her fiction is stiff and chary, as if she is too constrained by her knowledge of the pitfalls to turn her characters loose in their own lives. We should be thankful that Mantel doesn’t write this way.