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“... scrutiny in the way that Philippa Gregory’s books claim for themselves (to say nothing of Hilary Mantel): in fact the degree of waywardness on offer, the blur of Fordian impressionism, was the whole appeal of those books. When L.H. Myers set an immense tetralogy in the time of the Mughal Empire (The Near and the Far, 1929-40) it wasn’t because ...”

“... person … But there was no respite from the party that flowed round me.Acouple​ of years ago Hilary Mantel was asked to pick an ‘overlooked classic’, and she chose Good Behaviour, praising the book’s concision, its wit and method of ‘sly misdirection’. She is right, of course, but her assertion that ‘the heroine is also the narrator, yet ...”

“... all of them are occluded, attenuated, elaborated, in one way or another. This is one reason, as Hilary Mantel, for example, has noted, that the novels are easier to follow when you already know their stories in outline (as might also happen with fiction that embroiders well-known personalities from history, like Robespierre or Thomas Cromwell). You ...”

“... wanted to understand Thomas Cromwell you would go to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography rather than Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. But then Wolf Hall refreshes the parts of the past academic history cannot reach. Mantel has zeroed in on gaps in the archival record, the shallows and silences of the past, and exercises there ...”

“... advise them to get their bikes inside sharpish. 23 May. I’m coming to the end of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s novel, the first of two about Thomas Cromwell. Rich and vivid and teeming with life it’s a monumental work and some, at least, of one’s admiration is for Mantel’s sheer industry. Presented as very ...”

“... the kind of stuff that gives us a method for organising our ignorance of the past. It’s what Hilary Mantel callsthe record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of ...”