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Writing about Thomas Cromwell

24 February 2020

‘He was a good pick. I thought it was an amazing fact that Henry VIII's reign is told and told and told - but where is Cromwell? It seemed to me that no one had bothered to try to listen to his voice, and that it is such a major gap because he is so central. It's almost as if he was so central that people couldn't see him...

When you look at the earlier books, you can see the movement towards crisis, and the way I've chosen to do it is to lead the first book up to the death of Thomas More... and the second up to the death of Anne Boleyn. But when you get to the third book, there is no tidy pattern because the crises come every day, really; every day he is under siege from circumstances...

I admire his cleverness, his energy, is sheer appetite for life. I admire that kind of determination in the face of the worst life can throw at you...

Novels teach you about all sorts of circumstances in the bigger world that you might encounter or states you might pass through. I don't mean they formed a guide to conduct, but a guide to the complexities of life.'

Hilary Mantel, author of just-published The Mirror and the Light, the third book in her trilogy about Thomas More in The Sunday Times magazine. The first two books, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, both won the Man Booker Prize.