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.

... brilliantly introduces new fans to her astonishing breadth of interests.

The collection [...] serves as much as a display of Mantel’s shrewd eye and stylish prose as a testimony to her long, fruitful association with the LRB. Her reviews are capacious, erudite, well informed, and exacting.