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Publication
Fourth Estate (2020), 353 pages
Description
A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, 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 LRB 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, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member CarltonC
Excellent critical essays on a wide variety of subjects with fascinating contemporaneous facsimile copies of letters, postcards, faxes and emails written by Mantel to her editors at the London Review of Books.
Other than the humour that runs through most of them, there is a particular interest in
There is also an acute care over language, for example in reviewing a book about Robespierre, she notes of the author that “It’s wise, though, to be careful with certain loaded terms: “mob” is not the collective noun for Parisians, and should not be applied to the curious spectators who came, in 1790, to stare at the royal family when they took the air in the gardens of the Tuileries.”
I especially appreciated the humour of her 2010 essay Meeting the Devil, the description of Mantel’s operation gone wrong, the ability to write about the experience. I think that this has previously been published as Ink in the Blood, but can’t find my copy to confirm.
As with Mantel herself, I thought that her essay, Royal Bodies, which famously refers to Kate Middleton but also many other royals, was broadly sympathetic to them as individuals. Although well expressed, it has nothing new to say about royalty itself, but was a meaningful exploration of Henry VIII and his wives.
In the final essay about a biography of Margaret Pole by Susan Higginbotham, she writes of Higginbotham that her fiction is stiff and chary, as if she is too constrained by her knowledge of the pitfalls to turn her characters loose in their own lives. We should be thankful that Mantel doesn’t write this way.
Other than the humour that runs through most of them, there is a particular interest in
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those essays which touch on a subject about which she has written; the French Revolution, mediums and naturally about the Tudors.There is also an acute care over language, for example in reviewing a book about Robespierre, she notes of the author that “It’s wise, though, to be careful with certain loaded terms: “mob” is not the collective noun for Parisians, and should not be applied to the curious spectators who came, in 1790, to stare at the royal family when they took the air in the gardens of the Tuileries.”
I especially appreciated the humour of her 2010 essay Meeting the Devil, the description of Mantel’s operation gone wrong, the ability to write about the experience. I think that this has previously been published as Ink in the Blood, but can’t find my copy to confirm.
As with Mantel herself, I thought that her essay, Royal Bodies, which famously refers to Kate Middleton but also many other royals, was broadly sympathetic to them as individuals. Although well expressed, it has nothing new to say about royalty itself, but was a meaningful exploration of Henry VIII and his wives.
In the final essay about a biography of Margaret Pole by Susan Higginbotham, she writes of Higginbotham that her fiction is stiff and chary, as if she is too constrained by her knowledge of the pitfalls to turn her characters loose in their own lives. We should be thankful that Mantel doesn’t write this way.
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LibraryThing member Helenliz
A selection of reviews and other book related writings by Mantel that have appeared in the LRB over the years. I felt that she was always more engaging on the reviews of the books related to the Tudor period. At times she can be quite cutting and, without knowing if there is cause to be so, it can
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feel quite cruel. I'm not sure that this has necessarily inspired me to read more of her reviews, nor, if I'm honest, the books she was reviewing! Show Less
LibraryThing member bhowell
brilliant essays, I loved them, one of my favourites, shopping for a bookshelf in Jeddah!
LibraryThing member kjuliff
Bookless in Gaza
Mantel Pieces
Read by Olivia Dowd, Length:~11hours
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Read by Jane Carr, Length: ~4 hours
I decided to review these two books together, as both contain Mantel’s stories, literary articles and reviews. Also I read them consequently so they have
One of my favorite Pieces is “On Jane Boleyn” (2008) which starts with the so-Mantel remark that You may fear from the title of this book that they’d found yet another Boleyn girl. , which is a review of a book written by Julia Fox. Of course there wasn’t another Boleyn girl in the true sense, although another prolific writer, who Mantel refers to as “the energetic Philippa Gregory” has also written a Jane Boleyn biography.
Mantel is concise, full of humor, and is historical accurate. She expects other historical fiction writers to be the same. Unfortunately they are not, as Mantel has so much fun in acidly pointing out.
Another favorite was “Royal Bodies: from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton” (2013). At a writers’ festival in Hay-on-Wye Mantel was asked to name a famous person and to choose a book to give them. Not surprisingly Mantel hates such questions, but she had to answer. She chose Kate Middleton Duchess of Cambridge as the famous person, and the book to give her, the cultural historian Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. Need I say more. You can read this essay in the London Review of Books Feb 2013 Royal Bodies.
Another London Review of Books Essay, “Marie Antoinett” (1999) published in Pieces published under Fatal Non-Readers shows us how pamphlets in the 18thC were as vicious to Marie Antoinette as was the press to Diana Spencer. The similarities between the two blue-eyed, porcelain-skin, Marie Antoinette and Princess Di had more in common than their love of clothes and their need for them.The similarities in how they were treated is striking. Both were the subject of extreme misogyny and a hungry press.
In “Bookshop Shopping in Jeddah” (1988) we get a memoir snippet of Mantel’s life in Saudi. Bleak and bookless. Mantel concentrates on the lives of the women. In her own words.
“Housewives whose mothers sat in tents spend the days in their urban apartment blocks watching Egyptian soap-operas on TV. Students at the university would not buy books, their European teachers said: it was necessary for a department to buy enough copies of the standard texts, and place them in the library. My closest Muslim friend, a well-travelled and articulate woman, had a degree in English from a college in Pakistan. She mentioned one day that since her marriage, three years previously, she had read only one book..” - London Review of Books, March 1999
The stories and essays are undated in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I sense they are on the whole a bit older. Two stand out. “How Shall I know You” is an amusing story of Mantel’s overnight stay in the insalubrious Eccles House, a small seedy hotel in a remote town somewhere in the UK where she was obliged to go for a talk. The conveyor was as hopeless as the hotel, but Mantel makes it an amusing tale.
In “Sorry to Disturb” we get a look at her life as an expat in Jeddah, but a more intimate look than in Pieces’ “ Bookshop Shipping in Jeddah”. “Sorry to Disturb” is a story about her pointless friendship with a fellow expat, a rather dismal Pakistani accountant. Both of them are lonely but Mantel can enjoy her solitude. She feels duty-bound to invite her acquaintance to her home, though she becomes wary of his intentions. It’s worth reading if only to get an idea of Mantel’s silent husband.
I recommend both books, and hover between 3.5 and 4 in my rating. The individual stories served welcome break between my reading of full-length novels.
Mantel Pieces
Read by Olivia Dowd, Length:~11hours
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Read by Jane Carr, Length: ~4 hours
I decided to review these two books together, as both contain Mantel’s stories, literary articles and reviews. Also I read them consequently so they have
Show More
morphed into my mind as one long Mantel description of the real and literary worlds. Both truly excellent, though I preferred Pieces.One of my favorite Pieces is “On Jane Boleyn” (2008) which starts with the so-Mantel remark that You may fear from the title of this book that they’d found yet another Boleyn girl. , which is a review of a book written by Julia Fox. Of course there wasn’t another Boleyn girl in the true sense, although another prolific writer, who Mantel refers to as “the energetic Philippa Gregory” has also written a Jane Boleyn biography.
Mantel is concise, full of humor, and is historical accurate. She expects other historical fiction writers to be the same. Unfortunately they are not, as Mantel has so much fun in acidly pointing out.
Another favorite was “Royal Bodies: from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton” (2013). At a writers’ festival in Hay-on-Wye Mantel was asked to name a famous person and to choose a book to give them. Not surprisingly Mantel hates such questions, but she had to answer. She chose Kate Middleton Duchess of Cambridge as the famous person, and the book to give her, the cultural historian Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. Need I say more. You can read this essay in the London Review of Books Feb 2013 Royal Bodies.
Another London Review of Books Essay, “Marie Antoinett” (1999) published in Pieces published under Fatal Non-Readers shows us how pamphlets in the 18thC were as vicious to Marie Antoinette as was the press to Diana Spencer. The similarities between the two blue-eyed, porcelain-skin, Marie Antoinette and Princess Di had more in common than their love of clothes and their need for them.The similarities in how they were treated is striking. Both were the subject of extreme misogyny and a hungry press.
In “Bookshop Shopping in Jeddah” (1988) we get a memoir snippet of Mantel’s life in Saudi. Bleak and bookless. Mantel concentrates on the lives of the women. In her own words.
“Housewives whose mothers sat in tents spend the days in their urban apartment blocks watching Egyptian soap-operas on TV. Students at the university would not buy books, their European teachers said: it was necessary for a department to buy enough copies of the standard texts, and place them in the library. My closest Muslim friend, a well-travelled and articulate woman, had a degree in English from a college in Pakistan. She mentioned one day that since her marriage, three years previously, she had read only one book..” - London Review of Books, March 1999
The stories and essays are undated in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I sense they are on the whole a bit older. Two stand out. “How Shall I know You” is an amusing story of Mantel’s overnight stay in the insalubrious Eccles House, a small seedy hotel in a remote town somewhere in the UK where she was obliged to go for a talk. The conveyor was as hopeless as the hotel, but Mantel makes it an amusing tale.
In “Sorry to Disturb” we get a look at her life as an expat in Jeddah, but a more intimate look than in Pieces’ “ Bookshop Shipping in Jeddah”. “Sorry to Disturb” is a story about her pointless friendship with a fellow expat, a rather dismal Pakistani accountant. Both of them are lonely but Mantel can enjoy her solitude. She feels duty-bound to invite her acquaintance to her home, though she becomes wary of his intentions. It’s worth reading if only to get an idea of Mantel’s silent husband.
I recommend both books, and hover between 3.5 and 4 in my rating. The individual stories served welcome break between my reading of full-length novels.
Show Less
Language
ISBN
9780008430009