Hilary Mantel

Thursday

Hilary Mantel

Can these bones live?

From our UK edition

BBC Radio 4  – The Reith lectures A few years back, before I began writing novels about the Tudors, my partner and I bought a new-build house in Surrey. We bought it off-plan, and watched it grow out of an open field. The site looked like a battlefield from the Great War. It was a churned-up wasteland filled with shattering noise, and if you visited it after working hours, you felt as if you had arrived in the middle of a temporary truce, and the ground beneath your feet was still shaking. There was a sea of mud in which stood pipes and half-built walls and shrouded piles of bricks, and abandoned diggers stood in ditches, their jaws encrusted with clay. The evenings were silent. There was no birdsong, because no trees: nature had been eradicated.

Tuesday

Hilary Mantel

Last Morning in Al Hamra – Shiva Naipaul Prize, 1987

From our UK edition

The Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing was first awarded in 1987, and its first-ever winner was Hilary Mantel, who has since won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. Below is Hilary's prize-winning piece on Saudi Arabia; the judges 'particularly admired her ability to convey not only the discovery of a culture new to her but also the distaste which the discovery aroused', said then-editor of The Spectator Charles Moore. To learn more about the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and how you can enter, click here. To read Hilary Mantel's recent blog on what winning the prize meant to her, click here.

Saturday

Hilary Mantel

Portrait of a marriage

From our UK edition

In her foreword to Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 classic, The Tortoise and the Hare, Hilary Mantel reminds us of the unaccountability of love Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage is a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluffs and regroupings — a campaign pursued, sometimes, until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are fighting over, or have abandoned their first objectives in favour of secret ones.

Saturday

Hilary Mantel

The last of the vintage wine

From our UK edition

When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or entrained (taking their own monogrammed linen) for the major European spas. Her own family’s values looked back to the 18th century; her father was interested in mesmerism, and knew a man in Grasse who could raise the dead. In this long-awaited memoir, his daughter has performed the same feat.