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“... and been sated by offerings from Walter Scott to Ken Burns, Tolstoy to Margaret Mitchell, Hilary Mantel to Ben Pastor. Pastor seems to have invented a new way of combining the whole and the part in what TV producers might call the limited series.Yet it might chasten us to remember that as a result of our increased historicity today all novels are ...”

“... in London used to exhibit the skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose fate inspired Hilary Mantel to write a fine novel, The Giant, O’Brien, which examines the surgeon John Hunter’s avid pursuit of specimen bodies to study, the more unusual the more covetable. At the Hunterian, which is currently closed for renovation, the Irishman’s ...”

“... sternum-bruising heavies like Infinite Jest and Underworld and 2666, the multi-volume massifs by Hilary Mantel, Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Did it matter that Means (with his wife) was the dedicatee of one of the most celebrated megaliths of the past quarter-century, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Of course not. Or that Means had ...”

“... in favour of a plot that must have looked absolutely right – too right – for this day and age. Hilary Mantel had the same trouble, and with approximately the same results. In different ways two extremely talented writers: but they seemed to ignore here their own fictive instincts and – particularly in the case of Trevor – that sense of his own ...”

“... Penelope Lively is hoping to be offered a job as writer-in-residence on an oil-rig and Hilary Mantel thinks she could handle a stint of ‘collecting supermarket trolleys from far-flung parking bays’ (and adds: ‘Do not worry that you are depriving some sad moron of employment. That sad moron will soon have tied up a multi-million book-film ...”

“... takes experience as well as emotional intelligence, and no one gets it right every time. Hilary Mantel put it less generously, but more succinctly: ‘Nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job.’ The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not ...”

“... set of new questions and set a research agenda in a way that more tightly defined studies can’t. Hilary Mantel wrote of Religion and the Decline of Magic that ‘the author has no grand thesis to sell us. The joy of his dry and witty book is in its accumulation of fine detail, and also in its broad humanity.’ In Thomas’s latest, the same effect is ...”

“... novel, perhaps no period in Scottish culture has been so rich as that from the 1960s to the 1990s. Hilary Mantel, adopting like Amis and McEwan the autobiographical mode (since one way to write about modern novelists is to write about yourself), recalls her Irish immigrant background as well as her spells in Africa and Saudi Arabia. She is, she feels, a ...”

“... but slowing the tempo has been an effective device for John Updike in The Witches of Eastwick and Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black. Both of these writers compensate with a stronger evocation of atmosphere, a finer descriptive grain, while Ishiguro opts for deceleration without a thickening of texture. There’s plenty of dialogue in The Buried Giant, and ...”

“... the award. When I was on the panel in 1990, I wanted An Awfully Big Adventure to get the prize. Hilary Mantel was also an admirer. But it didn’t win. The dexterity of the plot, based on Peter Pan, hasn’t always been recognised. It responds to the darkness of what J.M. Barrie has to say about parents running off and being two-faced. But what sings ...”

“... wrinkled old woman. This account of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His ...”

“... avant garde.’ At the time I took him to be saying that it’s better to be Tyler Brûlé than Hilary Mantel. But I’m not so sure after reading Satin Island, which often comes across as a dry, despairing satire on McCarthy’s mantle-assuming coevals. The narrator – ‘Call me U,’ he says – is a deeply blank man in his early forties who was ...”

“... to himself, he was a loyal subject. And the same, I suppose, goes for me too.23 September. I knew Hilary Mantel was a good writer long before she fell for Thomas Cromwell (and it was a kind of love affair). I read her earlier novel Every Day Is Mother’s Day about a Northern social worker and found its dialogue funny and enviable. Her much lauded ...”

“... Theseus since 2015 – she attracts a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual ...”

“... the good stuff: And so it was that Jim Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the barren and would-be suburban land. The heavens opened and the sky ...”