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Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
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52
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
37/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Hilary Mantel
Publisher:
Fourth Estate
Date:
October 1, 2020
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.
What The Reviewers Say
Mantel Pieces, which includes nearly 30 years of Mantel’s essays for The London Review of Books, accompanied by facsimiles of her correspondence with its editors, is the story of an outsider finding her literary home.
Vast and various, the book offers the reader a fascinating vision of the restless intelligence that — in conjuring the Wolf Hall trilogy for which Mantel is most famous — has sustained and entertained so many. But it also functions as a heartening example of the rewards to be found in being undogmatic, curious, alert, roaming.
What Mantel has are much more useful qualities: a researcher’s in-depth grasp of every topic she writes about, fearlessness, originality and robust common sense. Her wide-ranging pieces, spanning three decades, are the best kind of critical writing, rich with recondite knowledge, wearing their learning lightly.
Worth buying for the title pun alone, Mantel Pieces brings together three decades’ worth of Hilary Mantel’s criticism in the London Review of Books. Review essays about historical figures including Jane Boleyn, Robespierre and Danton feature alongside pieces on Madonna, the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the killing of Jamie Bulger.
