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Hilary Mantel
‘Fiction redirects us to mystery and chance, and doesn’t assume that people know their own minds or hearts’: Hilary Mantel. Photograph: Ellie Smith/Contour RA
‘Fiction redirects us to mystery and chance, and doesn’t assume that people know their own minds or hearts’: Hilary Mantel. Photograph: Ellie Smith/Contour RA

Hilary Mantel: 'Being a novelist is no fun. But fun isn’t high on my list'

This article is more than 3 years old

The Booker prize-winning novelist answers questions from famous admirers and readers on Thomas Cromwell, ghosts and her writing process

As soon as the third volume of her Wolf Hall trilogy was out in the world, Hilary Mantel returned to her Devon study to give The Mirror and the Light a new life as a play, in a remote script-writing partnership with actor Ben Miles. The first reading is due to take place this week, but, without being able to meet face to face, it’s been a long haul, she says. They’ve collaborated by email, “so we have had to be very good clerks to each other”.

Decades before Mantel became one of the world’s best-known novelists, she combined the hard and penurious graft of fiction with the relatively easy rewards of life as a literary hack. “I have no critical training whatsoever so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly,” she wrote to Karl Miller, editor of the London Review of Books, in 1987.

That early hand-written letter is the first in over 30 years of correspondence between writer and editors that punctuates a new collection of her LRB essays, Mantel Pieces. “The Daily Express is sitting outside my house, phone ringing, etc… these are sad days for irony,” she emailed in 2013, after the publication of one of her more notorious pieces, tracing a line from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton. In it, she wrote that the mother to the future heir to the English throne “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”.

Many of the 20 Mantel Pieces reflect her lifelong preoccupation with the place of the female body in history, beginning with a 1988 evisceration of Shere Hite’s Women and Love (“Half the world’s fiction is about this but Hite wants to skewer it into a scientific fact”) and ending with a 2017 meditation on history’s lost women, inspired by a mediocre portrait that may or may not be of the Tudor gentlewoman Margaret Pole (“Where is Hans Holbein when you need him?”).

Timeline

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Thompson is born in Glossop, Derbyshire, to working-class Irish Catholic parents, who separate when she is 11. She changes her name when the family relocates to Cheshire with her mother’s new partner, Jack Mantel, and never sees her father again.

After attending a strict local convent school, she studies law at the London School of Economics and then at the University of Sheffield. She works as a social work assistant in a geriatric hospital and as a sales assistant in a department store after graduating.

Marries Gerald McEwen, a geologist. Later moves with him to Botswana and then to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Begins writing a novel about the French Revolution, which becomes A Place of Greater Safety (see below).

Publishes Every Day Is Mother’s Day, her debut novel, inspired by her time in social work. Follows it a year later with Vacant Possession, its sequel.

Returns to England and becomes the film critic of the Spectator, then starts reviewing books for other newspapers and magazines in Britain and the US.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, her third novel, draws on her life in Saudi Arabia to explore the tensions between Islamic culture and the liberal West. Publishes her fourth novel, Fludd, set in a fictitious village in northern England in the 1950s, a year later.

Publishes A Place of Greater Safety, the epic account of the lives of the French revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins that she began in Botswana.

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Three more novels are published: A Change of Climate in 1994, set in rural Norfolk; An Experiment in Love in 1995, which takes place over two university terms in 1970 and wins the Hawthornden prize; and The Giant, O’Brien in 1998, a fictionalised account of the life of Charles O’Brien, an 18th-century Irishman who was over 7ft tall.

Great acclaim greets her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, which chronicles her troubled childhood and teenage years and her lifelong struggle with endometriosis, which left her unable to have children.

Draws on her brushes with the supernatural as a child for Beyond Black, about a professional medium called Alison, which is shortlisted for the Orange prize.

Describes herself as “happily flying through the air” on winning the Booker prize with Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy of novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister.

Wins the Costa book of the year award and the Booker for a second time with Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, becoming the first British writer and the first woman to win the prize more than once.

Collaborates with the Royal Shakespeare Company on a stage adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which premieres at Stratford starring Ben Miles and Nathaniel Parker, before transferring to the West End and then to Broadway.

Mantel is made a Dame for services to literature by Prince Charles. Mark Rylance stars as Cromwell in the BBC’s Wolf Hall, alongside Damian Lewis as Henry and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn. The series is nominated for eight Emmy awards and wins a Golden Globe.

Makes the Booker longlist for The Mirror and the Light, the 912-page conclusion to her Cromwell trilogy, which sells 95,000 copies in the UK in just three days. On not reaching the shortlist she says she feels “disappointed” but “freed”, adding “books surf on the tide of the times”

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Mantel – who has been confined to home with her husband as both are at higher risk from coronavirus – wrote movingly about her struggles with her own body in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost; her essays reveal the continuing impact of that struggle on her intellectual worldview. “If, like me, you have a surgical menopause at the age of 27, you’ve thought your way through questions of fertility and menopause and what it means to be without children because it all happened catastrophically,” she says.

“It also meant I was aware what a rough deal women were getting from the medical profession: their pain wasn’t being controlled and they weren’t being heard. And it’s always been like that: either ‘she’s in our way’, or ‘she complains too much’, or ‘she talks too much’ or – in the case of Margaret Pole – she’s the wrong womb and she’s breeding heirs. So yes, I’d say the woman’s body problematised is a theme. I wouldn’t like people to think this is what I write about constantly, but it’s a shadow.”

Though the central character of her trilogy is a man – Thomas Cromwell – it is a history driven over the bodies of women, in particular the six who had the misfortune to marry Henry VIII. The first volume dwells largely on Katherine of Aragon, the second on Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, and by the third we have arrived at Anne of Cleves – though, as Mantel assures Ruth Cross below, without giving any spoilers, her account of the spurned German princess “comes out different from the received version”.

Among the many “lovely” questions submitted by Observer readers, she’s particularly interested by those that hark back to her previous, contemporary novel, Beyond Black, about haunted clairvoyant Alison. “In many ways it was a preliminary manoeuvre for the trilogy, in that it considered people’s relationship to a personal past and also to the historical past,” she explains.

“In Alison’s demonstrations, all sorts of royal figures go flitting past, doing their darndest to come through, and being greeted with non-recognition. I’m not saying the public is uninterested in history, but they think it’s a locked box called truth to which only historians have the key. That doesn’t allow for the dead being alive – which they are because they are subject to interpretation.”

It’s a powerful metaphor for Mantel’s own urge to conjure up forgotten, as well as familiar, ghosts, for export around the world, not only in her novels but in theatre and on TV. “There are so many different categories of dead: those who are constantly worked over and those who are known to history but whose names are not spoken from one generation to the next,” she says. “I like to think of them in the air of Manhattan – that seems a very wonderful and powerful thing”.
Claire Armitstead

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson

Novelist

This is a writer-to-writer question: I would be very happy to write and never publish (I’ve never heard another writer say this!). Do you feel the same, or does having someone read your words enrich your writing?
I’m just now reading Flora Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter, where the heroine writes: “Almost as a silkworm weaves a cocoon, with no thought of admiration.” I’m not a silkworm. I found it hard to get published and I wouldn’t have persisted beyond a point – I think if my second novel hadn’t been accepted, I’d have concluded there was no market for me. After that, I’d probably have written sneakily; I can’t help committing phrases. I think it’s easy to throw ideas down, but I probably need the lure of readers (and money) to see me through the whole story.

Lucy Prebble

Lucy Prebble

Playwright

Was the title of the new essay collection [Mantel Pieces] your own invention? Other than a good pun, what else are you not above enjoying?
The title is drawn from ancient usage. I believe I remember a Literary Review from the 1980s offering “free mantelpiece inside”.

At the moment I am not above enjoying Selling Sunset on Netflix. Chrishell, c’est moi.

Selling Sunset on Netflix, one of Hilary Mantel’s pleasures.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Historian and novelist

In your novels the dead speak, whether passing messages through a spiritualist medium or murmuring to Thomas Cromwell from the stones of his prison walls. What do you believe is our relationship with the dead, and what (if anything) do we owe them?
For Cromwell, who can’t avail himself of a psychoanalytic vocabulary, the dead bring messages from his past self to his present, and remind him of aspects of himself he has mislaid. His consciousness is interpenetrated by constantly shifting memories, which he’d prefer to quash in favour of the day’s agenda. But the dead nag and cajole, whining at the door like stray dogs. Whatever our relationship with them, I never find it consolatory. I was brought up to believe that my personal dead were undergoing the pains of purgatory. It wasn’t useful and I know it’s not true, but it lurks. See “ghosts” below.

Dan Snow

Dan Snow

Historian

Do you feel that great novelists can get closer to the essential truth than historians? (Because it feels like you do.)
I think novelists are alert for everything historians can find and verify, but then for something different, and extra; history’s unconscious, if you like. You try to grasp an individual’s moment-by-moment experience, as the tides of the past and present wash through them. You are working with what isn’t on the record and never could be, so you can never claim to be accurate, but you can aim to be plausible. Fiction is good at contradictions and flaws; it doesn’t deal just in cause and effect, but in the inconsequential, the incidental, the half-formed, half-understood, and what is too ephemeral to write itself into the record. To a degree, historians have to believe that people meant what they said and said what they meant, and that their actions can be interpreted by the logic of their lives and times. But fiction redirects us to mystery and chance, and doesn’t assume that people know their own minds or hearts.

David Hare

David Hare

Playwright

Is Budleigh Salterton as enchanting as it seems to the casual visitor?
We are enchanting and enchanted. We are blessed by fresh air and sea foam. We have palm trees. We fish by moonlight. We live to the age of Methuselah – check out Fore Street any day. Our tones are clipped or hearty, our clothes quilted and khaki/sludge, but our souls are wearing silk. We are not at all smug. And it is just not true that we have a sign that says: “Budleigh welcomes you: no riff-raff.”

Hilary Mantel on the beach near her home in Budleigh Salterton in the BBC programme Return to Wolf Hall. Photograph: George Miles/BBC/Oxford Film and TV
Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters

Novelist

When you approach your desk in the morning, do you ever find yourself wanting to run screaming in the opposite direction? If so, how do you get yourself to sit down and start writing? (I’m asking for a friend.)
I haven’t the energy for running and screaming (see daily routine, below) but often I want to lie and groan under a tarpaulin.

Roy Williams

Roy Williams

Playwright

Is there anything you know now about your career that you wish you knew when you started out?
That being a novelist is no fun, so it’s worth at least trying to be a playwright. Then again, fun isn’t high on my list; it’s more of a self-respect agenda. As Richard Ford said in the Guardian: “Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.”

Tom Holland

Tom Holland

Historian

Is the French Revolution a topic particularly suited to the young and the Reformation to the middle aged? And if so, what periods of history do you think might be particularly suited to the old?
The young are more apt to feel the need for revolutions, and have seen fewer fail. They are not defeated or fatalistic. They understand how to seize the moment, and can grasp why the French didn’t sit patiently for another generation, waiting for reform. I think a novelist is disempowered if she is cynical or jaded, if she feels human possibilities are exhausted. You have to write out of a belief that things could be different and better.

I would say the Reformation suits all ages; but though I thought about Thomas Cromwell when I was in my 20s, I couldn’t have written about him then. Just look at his portrait; experience weighs heavy.

The truly old should revert to myth, and live in the greenwood with Robin, spying out for the long curve of that arc that is said to bend towards justice.

Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell

Novelist

Do you ever frighten yourself as you are writing? I’m thinking in particular of Beyond Black, which is terrifyingly brilliant and brilliantly terrifying.
Mostly (after I get from under the tarpaulin) I sit chortling and rubbing my hands, at the effect I hope I’m having on my reader.

Amanda Foreman

Amanda Foreman

Historian

I’ve always wanted to know how you create the structure of your novels. The Wolf Hall series was written like a spider’s web. How did you do it?
If you think of any worthwhile novel – its intersecting arcs, its intertwined themes and metaphors – no one is clever enough to do it. When you have crammed your head with data, you have to take your hands off and see what shapes the story forms. You must trust the process, and that can be difficult, because you have to quell anxiety; the task is to get out of your own way. I think this is true for all worthwhile fiction, not just historical fiction. At the centre of your work is an act of faith in the novel form. You employ what Keats called “negative capability” – you must endure doubt and follow paths without signposts.

For sure, in the preparation stage, you need all your wits, all your commitment, all the resources of your memory. But after a certain point, you can’t engineer the novel, or will it. You can listen for it, make a space for it, pick out its approach in the distance.

Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren

Actor

How does your deep knowledge of and engagement with the past make you think about the future?
I don’t dwell on time’s arrow so much. I’m looking for what’s cyclical – for old stories taking new forms.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Historian and academic

Your Tudor England, and your revolutionary Paris, feel fascinatingly and alarmingly real to this historian reader. But are they always going to be a sort of parallel universe to 16th-century England and 18th-century Paris, like Lyra’s Oxford according to Philip Pullman?
That’s it exactly – they can’t be the real thing, only an uncanny simulation. In that space – as it were, a glass sphere or bubble – the people seem to have free will, and everything is to play for.

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie

Novelist

Cromwell’s increased prosperity is reflected in his dining table in The Mirror and the Light. You’ve obviously researched Tudor-era food – but did that extend to trying out any of the dishes you write about? I’m quite keen on the sound of the spiced wine custard myself.
I don’t cook them – the job’s done if they make me hungry. I think you have to live through your character’s senses, and Cromwell looks like a man who needs his dinner. I am a person who can’t rely on my body, so I live mainly in my head. But I had to learn to dwell in both.

Meg Rosoff

Meg Rosoff

Novelist

Other than making a living, why do you write?
I glimpse some fugitive meaning, glimmering in the general murk; I want to catch it in a net. I never do. But there’s always tomorrow.

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman

Novelist

Beyond Black has haunted me ever since I read it. The combination of malevolence and squalor is unique and unforgettable. Is there any chance of another excursion into the realms of the uncanny from your pen?
I have always wanted to write a perfect ghost story – as opposed to live in one. But I have a feeling that if you sit down with that intention, you will fail – perhaps it’s better to be attentive to the strangeness of everyday life. I have a sense that with one side-step my foot would go through reality, as through ice. In Beyond Black, someone refers to “the laws of nature” and the psychic Alison says: “I don’t think we have them these days. I think it’s a bit of a free-for-all.”

Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell

Author and academic

If you could steal a painting from anywhere in the world to hang above your writing desk, which would it be?
St Jerome in His Study, by Antonello da Messina; with his country views, and his lion sauntering in.

Saint Jerome in his Study, 1475, by Antonello da Messina. Photograph: Alamy
Peter Stothard

Peter Stothard

Author

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is, for me, your best short story. Do you have any other candidates for unexpected violent death, fictional of course?
I think I’ve written a better story, called Kinsella in His Hole, in which small children murder their teacher. It gives some idea of how I enjoyed my education, and maybe it washed the violence out of me. Paper violence, anyway.

Kate Summerscale

Kate Summerscale

Author

You’ve often written about ghosts. What part do they play in your writing life?
I am conscious of psychological undercurrents and sometimes I call them ghosts. Sometimes I call them fragments of possibility. I think of them as torn-off pieces of text, sometimes anonymous, sometimes in unknown languages, or half-obliterated by ink spills. Or as watermarks – you only see them when you look through the paper. I try to get them into a good light, so I can get use out of them.

Readers’ questions

We hear you don’t intend to write more historical fiction. But if you were forced at gunpoint, which character(s) and period would you be interested in?
Kenneth Brady

I am keeping my options open – all I know is that I haven’t another huge research project in me, not of the magnitude of the Cromwell trilogy. I’d be minded to shuttle backwards a bit, perhaps to Henry VII – whom I thought under-appreciated, till the historian Thomas Penn wrote his brilliant book Winter King. I am fascinated by Yorkist impostors, and Ann Wroe’s book Perkin: A Story of Deception is one of the most imaginative histories I have ever read: Perkin Warbeck is a wonderful subject, but in fiction you can’t have a hero known as Perkin – you just can’t.

The abuse of women is so written into the fabric of life at the Tudor court and I wonder what decisions you made in advance about how to approach that subject. Oh, and do you think Anne Boleyn did cheat on Henry?!
Ruth Cross

I find it enough to live in the scene and the moment – I don’t need to make decisions of principle, other than the standfirst decision to question everything. So you will see that, in The Mirror and the Light, the Anne of Cleves story comes out different from the received version.

I think it’s unlikely that Anne Boleyn cheated on Henry, but I doubt her contemporaries found the charges as outrageous or unlikely as we do – I don’t think we can convict them all of bad faith. However, the events that unfold in the early chapters of the third novel cast new light on what was happening in the Queen’s household in the spring of 1536.

What is your typical working day? Please do include as much minutiae as possible.
Douglas Fink, London

There’s no typical because there’s so much to do, apart from the core activity of writing – it’s what I put first, and it’s what I do first when I wake, but I’d welcome more empty space in the day. In the final two or three years of The Mirror and the Light, I grew into a routine, but not one I’d wish on anybody. I would wake up at 4am, like a monk or nun summoned by a bell. I would write my journal, look at the sky, and listen to the sea. I would go back to bed at dawn, and for a couple of hours fall into a deep sleep. Then wake up in a panic, having dreamed of libraries or something worse. My dreams stain my day, though it’s not all bad. Once I dreamed I had won a tennis tournament, beating Navratilova.

First I would tackle emails, feed any other projects. Then I would get to my office, which is a few minutes away. As soon as I put the key in the door I would feel better, because I had carved out dedicated time, and by evening the book would be in a better place, though it might be slow going on any particular day.

For the rest of the day I would read, plan, read, write, play with my coloured pencils and draw on my whiteboard. Mysteriously, while I was writing this book it was always winter, always on the verge of dark; there must have been spring, but the seasons began to merge. At lunchtime I would think of going for a walk but seldom do it, intend a proper break but never take it. Invariably the writing would spark into life at 5pm, and at that point I would write like a fiend on speed. At 7pm my husband would let himself in and find a dazed wretch, hungry and freezing. I would go home and defrost in the shower. There I would get a good idea – the one that had been eluding me all day – and I would step out dripping, and write it down, knowing it was the beginning of tomorrow’s work.

Having made progress this way, I resolved to repeat the programme, till I was dead or it was done.

Mark Rylance in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd

Was it hard to write Thomas Cromwell’s death? And now the books are all out there, do you miss him as a presence and grieve for him or is it a relief to have said goodbye?
Rachel Bailey

When I wrote the first sentence of Wolf Hall – “So now get up” – I realised that I had written the last sentence, though not perhaps the very words. On the first page you had a boy of 15, felled, bleeding, watching his own blood, a breath from annihilation. Go on 40 years, and here he is again on the ground, seeing his life seep away, seconds from extinction; together we have reached the last page.

So on that first day of writing, the whole story seemed to be contained in a single present moment; I had it in my hand. A few weeks on, I had a fuller idea of how the end might go, so I wrote several drafts. When the moment came, I could reach for them, and it took the terror out of the final day’s work. Artists talk a lot about inspiration, but perhaps they ought to talk more about filing.

When I wrote the final words, it was only to begin a fresh stage of rereading and revising. And almost at once I began working on the stage play – in collaboration with Ben Miles, who will play Cromwell. Then there is a TV series to come. So Cromwell is part of my present, not my past.

There is a pandemic going on in the background of your Tudor trilogy; however, it doesn’t seem to be as constantly in your face as today’s pandemic. I was comforted by the way the book reminded me that this is not a unique event in our history and may not have as big an impact as we think it will in the coming years. Based on what you know about how the “sweating sickness” affected life during that era, do you think the current pandemic may be forgotten fairly quickly?
Kurt Bortecene, Istanbul

I hope not – I hope it will be kept constantly in mind, so that we can be ready for recurrence or the next epidemic. I hope it will lead us to question our assumptions and priorities, and to ask basic questions: what is work, and what kinds should we value? Why do we have cities? What is education? It’s open to us to remake the world, but a pity it takes mass dying to make us engage.

For the Tudors, short lives and early deaths were givens, and they had a religious framework that could accommodate them. The sweating sickness was a newish peril during the years of my trilogy, but plague might come any year. Though they didn’t think in our scientific terms, they did understand the need for cleanliness and for self-isolation. The sweating sickness, unlike our present epidemic, hit the young particularly hard. Once symptoms took hold, there wasn’t much they could do except pray.

After the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, you said your aim wasn’t to rehabilitate Cromwell. Did this change while writing The Mirror and the Light?
Nosheen, Leeds

My aim throughout has been to look at him, and see him – not to judge him or plead for him.

In 2012, you said: “I think that nowadays the Catholic church is not an institution for respectable people.” How can you make such a sweeping judgment on millions of people in the UK and the rest of the world?
Carter Bell, Yorkshire

Perhaps this incident merits revisiting, though I’m never sure if it’s worth trying to put the record straight – explaining looks too much like apologising, and I’m not going to do that. But what I hoped to say, in that painfully pointless interview, was that the Catholic church is not an institution that respects its people. I didn’t intend a judgment on millions of the devout, but on a handful of powerful old men. I expect I misspoke. I had a sense that I should back out and try the sentence again, but by that stage I’d given up on the interviewer and was feeling sardonic. When the comment appeared in print, I didn’t try to correct it, because I was amused by the flaring hoity-toity indignation – the faithful shouting that they weren’t respectable, Christ wasn’t respectable, and so on. It seems that respectable is not a thing to be.

What was the most surprising/shocking thing you discovered about Cromwell when doing your research for the novels?
Martin McDonald, Manchester

It wasn’t Cromwell who shocked me, but his historians – their errors and prejudices, rolled down the years and gathering moss. Thanks to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography, and other recent and honest efforts, we have a cleaner version now.

Would you like to have lived in Tudor times?
Fiona Drake, Derbyshire

I don’t think I’d have lived very long.

Your experience with a sinister paranormal force as a child (as recounted in Giving Up the Ghost) intrigues me. Do you consider yourself psychic and do you actually believe in ghosts?
Jayne Lamb, Melbourne

I can’t explain that experience and I don’t want to explain it away. It was an experience of evil – nothing to do with ghosts as such, and really nothing to do with me; I had the feeling that by accident I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed something not meant for my eyes or anyone’s.

Ghosts were a different area of difficulty. It is true that we believed, or half-believed, our house was haunted. We were an unhappy family and it’s possible we were haunting ourselves.

Winning the Booker prize for Wolf Hall in 2009. Photograph: Wenn/Alamy

Did your experience of injustice and powerlessness at the hands of the medical profession change you, and has it found its way into your writing?
Emma Hamley, New Zealand

I suppose it reinforced my always-active sense of being on the side of the underdog, and of life as a struggle that demands all your courage and will.

If you had the absolute power to decide the future of the monarchy in the UK, what would you do?
Ksenija Vucinic, Aarhus, Denmark

I used to think I would liberate the royals into private life. But now I think I might reinstitute an absolute monarch, at least for the life of this government, since it’s likely the Queen has more decent instincts than her ministers. Off with their heads!

How do you think Thomas Cromwell would fit into the current British political landscape?
Libby, Lincoln

I’m tempted to say “at the top”. But the context is so different that I can’t imagine him as a contemporary – in fact, I deliberately try not to. I think our recognition of the dead has to include the fact that they were products of their own time, and we can’t retailor them to fit us.

What are your favourite ever novels?
Kristina, Germany

Maybe I’m yet to read them. I am seldom not reading Ivy Compton-Burnett, but I hesitate to recommend her, as I know she’s peculiar.

In another 500 years, who and what do you think will be the big subjects in historical fiction about our own time?
Beth Sharrock, Staffordshire

I’d like to think there will still be readers, and novels, but I fear that if we’re here at all we’ll be back in caves, daubing horned gods on the walls.

  • Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel is published by Fourth Estate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

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