Tag: Hilary Mantel

Book Review – ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ by Hilary Mantel

~ Helene Harrison ~ Leave a comment

'Bring Up the Bodies' by Hilary Mantel (2012).
‘Bring Up the Bodies’ by Hilary Mantel (2012).

I finally finished reading Hilary Mantel’s (relatively) new book Bring Up the Bodies and this is my review.

Generally, I thought it was engaging and well-written. However, I was a little disappointed. I don’t know if that’s just because it was so hyped up, and then it won the Man Booker Prize, but I just felt that it was a bit slow to get into the story. I preferred Bring Up the Bodies to Wolf Hall, however, partly because it was more ‘my’ period – the fall of Anne Boleyn, but also because it looked at more outside Cromwell’s own life, and it examined opinion and perception., which is a huge part of my own research.

Genre/s: Historical Fiction / Romance / Drama.

Setting: London (UK) – Greenwich, Tower of London, Austin Friars, Whitehall

Continue reading “Book Review – ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ by Hilary Mantel” →

Hilary Mantel on Anne Boleyn

~ Helene Harrison ~ 4 Comments

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/11/hilary-mantel-on-anne-boleyn

Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize for the second time!
Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize for the second time!

You might have realised by my previous posts, my love for Hilary Mantel, who has written an article on Anne Boleyn. This are only snippets with my opinions underneath. To read the full article, click on the link above. The tagline of Hilary Mantel’s article on Anne Boleyn:-

“We argue over her, we admire and revile her – we constantly reinvent her. Henry VIII’s second wife is one of the most controversial women in English history”

Mantel is very right – there has never been anyone in English history who has prompted quite so much argument as Henry VIII’s second wife. We admire her deeply for everything she’s done and everything she’s been through, and the way she handled her death. She has been reviled, but that is a less likely outcome than admiration. She is reinvented by different historians in different areas of her life – guilty or innocent, Catholic or Protestant, whore or not. She is controversial because of the lack of evidence and sources on her, and the imagination that goes into fictional adaptations of her. Continue reading “Hilary Mantel on Anne Boleyn” →

Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize for the second time!

~ Helene Harrison ~ Leave a comment

Hilary Mantel Wins the Man Booker Prize for the second time with 'Bring Up the Bodies'.

Yesterday (16th October 2012) Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, won the Man Booker Prize for the second time for her follow-up novel, Bring Up the Bodies. I haven’t read it yet, but it is on my to-read list. However, I have read Wolf Hall. I’m particularly excited about this one because it focuses on the period I am most interested in – the fall of Anne Boleyn. According to the Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booker-prize/9612717/Booker-Prize-2012-Hilary-Mantel-wins-again.html):-

“The prize confirms Mantel’s gift for writing historical fiction, of course, but also the historic nature of the project itself: her trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell will surely, by the time she has finished, come to seem an achievement of era-defining proportions – one in which, as she put it recently, “I knew from the first paragraph that this was going to be the best thing I’d ever done”.” Continue reading “Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize for the second time!” →