Bill Hamilton, who was Mantel’s agent throughout her career, said it had been “the greatest privilege” to work with the writer. “Her wit, stylistic daring, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her out as one of the greatest novelists of our time.” A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy 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. 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 George Miles sent her a dummy book after he had collected a critical mass of photographs. “I remember saying, ‘we have to do something with these’, Mantel says. “But I had no idea what, at the time, or that it would be such an odyssey, marching on at the same time as the books.”.

Mantel is preparing to leave Devon to set up home with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month, having previously expressed her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. She has become a byword for a particular kind of intensely-felt, brilliantly subtle exploration of the past. She made headlines a year ago, when she suggested the monarchy could be facing “the endgame”, and may not “outlast William”; and a lecture she gave in 2013, entitled Royal Bodies, in which she described the then Duchess of Cambridge as a “plastic princess”, caused an outcry. Many people wilfully misread her criticism of what she explained as “the way we maltreat royal persons, making them one superhuman, and yet less than human”.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.

Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel 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”.HarperCollins confirmed she had died on Thursday “suddenly yet peacefully”, surrounded by close family and friends. To date the Wolf Hall trilogy has sold more than five million copies worldwide and has been translated into 41 languages. Earlier this month HarperCollins published The Wolf Hall Picture Book, a photography book by Mantel and co-authors Ben Miles and George Miles. Very few writers manage not just to excavate the sedimented remains of the past, but bring them up again into the light and air so that they shine brightly once more before us. Hilary Mantel has done just that’ Simon Schama, Financial Times