The Wolf Hall Picture Book

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I am, as I think a lot of authors are, concerned about the speed at which we are consuming history now, the way that the past, the very recent past, is being made into a version and real-life people walking around have to live with their representatives and so on,” she says, not naming names, but nodding when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s imminent appearance as Boris Johnson in This England. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison’ The Times Today, Mantel says she is alive to the danger of drawing shallow links with present-day politics and society. Because she dealt with big historical moments it was easy for some people to forget that Mantel was often joking. Her propensity for mischief and her ear for irony were peerless. The main target of her short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is not Thatcher but the narrator, a cosy liberal just popping some Perrier in the fridge when a gunman rings her doorbell. She thinks he’s a photographer, trying to capture the prime minister emerging from an eye hospital in Windsor. “How much will you get for a good shot?” she asks, letting him size up the view from her window. “Life without parole,” the man replies. She laughs: “It’s not a crime.” “That’s my feeling,” he says as he assembles his rifle. I think simply because I prize the long view so much. And that’s why I won’t make the parallels. I think that if you do, it turns real people into these kind of fantasy figures and unfortunately, they’re not. They’re real, present and dangerous.”

Hers are books that refuse to shy away from the underside of life … Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers’ Olivia Laing, Observer At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary MantelGeorge Miles describes a photograph his brother took at Hampton Court, showing Mantel holding a broadsword in the middle of a demonstration of swordfighting as Ben sneaked off to take a picture of Anne Boleyn’s room. “When you arrived at a place with your camera,” Ben recalls, “you often felt like you were on a route around the place that obviously wasn’t the designated route by the custodian of the place. And it was often one sort of long meandering digression. You never really knew what you were looking for.”

For all its structural and thematic importance, however, Cromwell's conflict with More is only part of a wider battle caused by Henry's desire to have his first marriage annulled. Much space is given over to court politics, which Mantel manages to make comprehensible without downplaying its considerable complexity. Central figures - the Boleyn sisters, Catherine of Aragon, the young Mary Tudor, the king himself - are brought plausibly to life, as are Cromwell's wife, Liz Wykys, and Cardinal Wolsey. Determined, controlled but occasionally impulsive, and a talented hater, Mantel's Anne Boleyn is a more formidable character even than her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, portrayed here as a scheming old warhorse who rattles a bit when he moves on account of all the relics and holy medals concealed about his person. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform. But as fortune’s wheel turns, Cromwell’s enemies are gathering in the shadows. HarperCollins confirmed she had died on Thursday “suddenly yet peacefully”, surrounded by close family and friends. Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 6 July 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, and went on to become a social work assistant in a geriatric hospital. Mantel married the geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972. The couple divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was published in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety. In 1977, Mantel and her husband moved to Botswana, living there for five years. Later, they spent four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. Mantel's Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he's also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey's project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn't Cromwell's only motive. He's disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey's rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books.

Colin Callender, CEO of Playground, says “Following the success of the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning original television adaptation of the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, we are thrilled and honoured that, nine years later, we have been able re-unite Peter Kosminsky and his brilliant team, in front of and behind the camera, to bring Thomas Cromwell ‘s final chapter to the screen. Intimate, thrilling, and deeply moving, The Mirror and the Light shines a fresh light on the politics of power and the personal price paid by those who wield it. Cromwell’s story is as contemporary as ever – a story of loyalty and betrayal that just happens to be about people 500 years ago.” Though best known as a historical novelist, Mantel was less concerned with history than with its shape-shifting relative, recollection. Between her dazzling scholarship and frequent hilarity of her dialogue lay her true subject: “the operation”, as she once phrased it, “of memory”. Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century’ Observer, Stephanie Merritt’ -

The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context… The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives’ Guardian Critical Praise Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary MantelAs well as supremely talented, Mantel was also “a joy to work with”, Pearson said. “Only last month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon, while she talked excitedly about the new novel she had embarked on. That we won’t have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. What we do have is a body of work that will be read for generations. We must be grateful for that.”