Second paragraph of third essay (on John Osborne’s memoirs):

A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of a lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing.

This is a collection of twenty essays by Hilary Mantel from the London Review of Books, published between 1988 and 2019, including her piece comparing the popular cult of the bodies of Anne Boleyn and Kate Middleton which got a lot of coverage at the time.

These are all witty and mostly humane, with my favourites being the pieces that concentrate on her areas of historical expertise, the Tudors and the French Revolution. I thought her pieces on some of the minor Tudor figures, Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon and Margaret Pole, were particularly strong.

There are also a couple of reflections on more contemporary culture, including the famous “Royal Bodies” essay, but also a grim reflection on the death of James Bulger and a piece about Madonna which says pretty much what you’d expect.

I confess that I had not realised that Mantel wrote much apart from the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, but her messages to the LRB editor reproduced here are full of references to other novels and books that she was writing, including her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety. I’ll start looking our for them.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall, and The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.