Her awareness of her own body makes her acutely aware of others, as when she considers the ill health of Henry VIII. "Historians &, I'm afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper & wear away both the personality and the intellect."⠀

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It’s important to ensure that your solid oak products are ethically sourced and of the very highest quality. By choosing to buy from a well-established brand like UK oak, you know that you’ll get exactly what you expect. Our mantel pieces are beautifully crafted and built to last. The author is, of course, quite brilliant on the Tudors and the various iterations of Henry VIII, from strapping young prince (“Hooray Henry”), through pious apostate (“Holy Henry”) to tyrannical Bluebeard (“Horrid Henry”). But she also argues persuasively that the ageing and increasingly irascible king fits the picture for McLeod syndrome, the symptoms of which include progressive muscular weakness in the lower body, depression, paranoia, and an erosion of personality – which would make the tragedy of his reign “not a moral but a biological tragedy, inscribed on the body”. In his later years Henry suffered from osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone of the leg. ‘Historians,’ says Mantel writes, ‘and, I’m afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect.’In my Catholic childhood, I had a fascination with the stories of women who became Catholic saints, so the essay on "holy anorexia" found its perfect audience. Her piece on the way “royal bodies” are viewed and treated by the public and the media is forceful. Interspersed among the essays themselves are photocopied correspondences between Mantel and her LRB editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. Many of these are a chore to make out, being both tiny and handwritten, and since they seem to be selected almost at random I'm not really sure what the benefit will be for most readers. Fun if you'd like a glimpse at how the sausage is made, I suppose. For those suffering from Tudor withdrawal, there are pieces on Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, and Margaret Pole. Despite her protestations to the contrary "I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly". Mantel is no slouch in critiquing some dry sounding history books: I am a big fan of Mantel's writing, although as a writer I am constantly depressed by her with the ever present thought of "how does she write so brilliantly" coupled with the knowledge I won't write anything as good. I think this book is really for the hard core fans rather than just anyone who likes her Wolf Hall trilogy or other works. It consists on selected writing from the London Review of books which she is a frequent reviewer for - including her essay Royal Bodies which caused quite a stir a few years ago, (although for those of a calmer disposition with relation to anything to do with royalty it is hard to see why). 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 all focalise on misogyny - the infamous Royal Bodies, the Hair Shirt Sisterhood, and Britain's Last Witch; she takes figures of history who have been mythologised, and dissects the phallocentric iconography that has warped their image. And as someone who is still haunted by periods of physical and mental ill health, Meeting The Devil is the essay that lingers in my mind with a spectral quality. She writes about the visceral and mental aspects of pain so well:

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Marie Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. There is, therefore, a temptation to write afterthoughts into these pieces, to embellish them with later and better thinking. I have not done that, but left them as they were--mantelpieces littered with to-do lists, and messages form people I used to be.” From the Introduction

In both women, Mantel recognises how much the dead follow the living around & that to be alive is to be haunted. Her memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, explores this in respect to her own life & draws out her other great preoccupation: bodies & how they limit our world. ⠀ The Murder of James Bulger – what does a murder and the children’s crusade have in common? The question ‘at what age are children responsible for the things they do, especially the horrific things they sometimes do’.

Hilary Mantel Takes On Royals and Rebels in a Book of Essays Hilary Mantel Takes On Royals and Rebels in a Book of Essays

On Charles Brandon – this essay stood out to me because I realised that while I enjoyed reading the review, it made me not want to read the book I will never read most of the twenty books that make up the substance of Mantel Pieces but that doesn’t matter. Each review is a little jewel in itself - exhaustively researched and written in clean, lucid prose. Two, on very personal topics, were my favorites. One covered meeting her stepfather when she was four years old, where to my memory, she totally nailed the viewpoint from that age. Another, the frank depiction of her horrific experience in the hospital after surgery, felt like a public service announcement wrapped in a horror story. “None of us thinks the complication rate applies to us.”I rather admire Hilary the most when she is being deliciously mean as well as rigorously intellectual. A skill she applies across a surprising breadth of topics.

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The most famous essay in this collection of pieces that Mantel wrote from the London Review of Books is Mantel’s “Royal Bodies”. The response to this essay was in part anger, in particular because of a description of Kate Middleton that describes as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung . . . a shop-window mannequin with no personality of her own, entirely define by what she wore” (269) and “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish” (271) and perhaps most damningly “What does Kate read? It’s a question” (271). In her essay on Britain's Last Witch, she describes the life of Helen Duncan, a psychic imprisoned in Royal Holloway for divulging state secrets from The Other Side.⠀ The debilitating pain of her endometriosis was initially treated with antipsychotics & then abdominal surgery that left her infertile, treated with steroids that transformed her body. ⠀ Anderson's book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna's wedding was different from other people's. These essays are culled from Mantel’s semi-regular contributions to the London Review of Books over a period of many years. Most are based on books she’s reviewing, chosen because they’re of interest to her for one reason or another. The story of a medium prosecuted for being a witch—in the 1940s—greatly interests Mantel, and so interested me, especially as it turns into an indictment of the type of people (gender- and class-wise) deemed guilty.Like a Tudor detective, Mantel ferrets out the slightest whiff of historical overreach whilst managing to land some sly burns not once, but twice, to the hapless Phillipa Gregory. My favourite “piece” wasn’t a review at all but an essay called 'Meeting the Devil' written on the harrowing aftermath of her medical procedure. I can’t imagine a more intense, graphic telling. This is part of a series of diary writings that reflect on her experiences in Saudi Arabia and meeting her step-father, as well. It's reassuring to see her research in action and to appreciate to what extent it props up her fiction - she ably resists the impulse to infodump everything she knows in her novels, but the foundations as evidenced here are deep and secure. I found every review interesting, even if I thought the book itself wouldn’t be for me. For example, the first review was of Shere Hite’s 1988 effort 'Women and Love'. I’m familiar with Ms Hite’s work from the days when I worked in a bookstore, in California. Mantel nails Hite succinctly calling her work “an uneasy blend of prurience and pedantry”. Ouch! Or, iconoclastically titling the review of Chris Anderson’s book 'In Bed with Madonna' as 'Plain Girl’s Revenge Made Flesh'. Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment