Mantel Pieces

Name: Mantel Pieces
Brand: Harper UK
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Author: Hilary Mantel
ISBN: 9780008429997

Author: Hilary Mantel

Narrator: Olivia Dowd, Hilary Mantel - introduction

Unabridged: 10 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Published: 10/01/2020

Categories: Nonfiction, Literary Collections, Biography & Autobiography, History, European History, Literary Criticism, Women Authors

Synopsis

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the , 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 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, is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.

About Hilary Mantel

English author, Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, was born in Glossop, Derbyshire in 1952. She attended St. Charles Roman Catholic primary school in the mill village of Hadfield. Her parents were actually Irish descent, but were born in England. Mantel's father divorced her mother and left when she was eleven years old. She never saw him again. Her mother did not marry, but spent her life with Jack Mantel, from whom Hilary took his name as her surname. Her schooling ended with a bachelor's degree in Jurisprudence in 1973. She then worked in social work in a geriatric hospital.

Her books include historical fiction, including a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power under King Henry VIII. They were Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light (which was just released in the UK in March of 2020). She twice won the Booker Award.

In keeping with her unconventional life, Hilary married Gerald McEwen, a geologist in 1972, and they lived in exotic places such as Botswana and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They were divorced after he gave up geology to be her business manager, but then remarried.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Eleanor on October 28, 2020

Sublime, as you'd expect. What is new, however, is that when she sinks her teeth into a subject, she's brutal: “Our heroine is charmless, foul-mouthed [...] We know that in this film we are seeing the real Madonna - for we know from her other films that she cannot act”. The essays that shine through......more

Quotes

‘It shows the evolution in Mantel’s style, which has been considerable. Some of the pieces are segments of memoir, some are deeply informed historical essays loosely attached to discussions of books. In the earliest reviews – before she is given subjects big enough for her to walk around in – Mantel is sarky and snarky as well as brisk and breezy … Mantel’s own segments of memoir, which were published as diary pieces, are virtuoso performances … … It is only when her essays are laid out like this that we can see the inside of Mantel’s huge head, bulging with knowledge and a million connections. 5/5 STARS’ ‘This is a work that is brisk and breezy, and further ’ ‘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 … ’ ‘A volume of critical writing which often feels as if one is in the company of an exceptionally wise and generous friend, exept very few of us have friends who can be as erudite on Madonna as they are on Anne Boylen’ Sara Collins ‘Bad girls. Ecstatic masochists. Housewives with hidden depths. Revolutionaries who rebelled all the way to the madhouse. These unruly women are her enduring obsession’ Helen Lewis, ‘Likely to leave readers in awe of the purity of Mantel’s prose, the breadth of her interests and the sharp intelligence she brings to every topic … Reading it is like downing a cold, sharp glass of lemonade on a swelteringly hot day: crisp, tart and unbelievably refreshing’ ‘’