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. Mantel’s reputation was further enhanced with the publication of the novel A Place of Greater Safety (1992), a richly detailed chronicle of the French Revolution as seen through the eyes of three of its central participants. She drew on her years in Botswana to write the novel A Change of Climate (1994), about British missionaries in South Africa, and on her own straitened adolescence for the clear-eyed coming-of-age novel An Experiment in Love (1995). Three years later she returned to historical fiction with The Giant, O’Brien, which imaginatively explores and contrasts the lives of two real 18th-century figures—a freakishly tall sideshow performer steeped in the Irish oral tradition and a Scottish surgeon in thrall to modern science. This sets the scene for what follows – there is a mystery that lies beyond the visible world, miraculous things appear to happen and very ordinary things appear miraculous. There is a hint of the supernatural. 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. he tells her, was ''releasing spirit from matter,'' freeing ''the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide.''''How do I know that it is not you who is the

The plot is delightful, which is rare in Mantel. Fetherhoughton may be bleak, and the majority of its inhabitants dreary, but after the arrival of the mysterious curate Fludd things begin to happen that are, in a restrained, credible way, magical. 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. It's a pity it takes mass dying to make us engage 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. 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”. 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.

vernacular Mass. ''Do you mean,'' he says, ''that they could understand what we were saying?''''Exactly the point,'' the bishop replies. Angwin's parishioners, For shoes, the women wore bedroom slippers in the form of bootees, with a big zip up the middle. When they went outdoors they put on a stouter version of the same shoe in a tough dark brown suede. Their legs rose like tubes, only an inch or so exposed beneath the hems of their big winter coats.

This is a very competent dissection of superstition, but it is done with warmth and without cruelty; and there are some great quotes: 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”. 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. Before reading “Fludd,” my only Mantel exposure was her controversial short story collection, “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.” Having had a bluntly physical confrontation with the slightly rusted Iron Lady (Lady??) I very much enjoyed reading Mantel’s story published well after Thatcher’s death. “Fludd” has a similar theme – liberation. Despite the above paragraphs, the book is a humorous and sarcastic denunciation of nonsense and humbuggery. Here, it is the self-imposed prison of SIN created by the Catholic Church. What is a sin? How do you know if you have committed a sin? How does a nun maintain Christian modesty when taking a bath? (Secret – she avoids being naked by covering up all her body’s fun bits with a shift before disrobing and is never, ever completely naked)worked in metal, but practiced on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous.''''I think Father Fludd has the gift of prophecy,'' one observer remarks. ''Prophecy The writing is characteristically Mantel: mordant, pitiless, razor-sharp. ''One priest in a family equals three or four nuns,'' Philomena says. ''That's the way they count in Ireland.'' The sisters rise from