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 At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel 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. Susanne Simpson, Executive Producer of Masterpiece says: “I am incredibly proud to bring Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to Masterpiece and the American audience. It is thrilling that such brilliant actors as Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis will reprise their roles for this final chapter of Thomas Cromwell’s story. The level of excellence on and off screen for this series is incomparable.”

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison’ The Times So original and disconcerting that it will surely come to be seen as a paradigm-shifter’ Sunday Telegraph As well as supremely talented, Mantel was also “a joy to work with”, Pearson said. “Only last month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon, while she talked excitedly about the new novel she had embarked on. That we won’t have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. What we do have is a body of work that will be read for generations. We must be grateful for that.” The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context… 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.

I saw her one evening when she had just delivered the manuscript for The Mirror and the Light. She felt it was her best book. Her reason for that was to do with the freedom the first two volumes had earned her. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – both of which won the Booker prize – she had worked hard to draw readers in, unsure if they’d stay. For Ben Miles, with whom Mantel co-adapted The Mirror and the Light for its run last year at the Gielgud theatre in London, the project was part of a continuing collaboration of nearly a decade’s standing. The three of them began to visit places together, one of them often acting as a decoy to the helpful guides intent on showing them the official version. I am, as I think a lot of authors are, concerned about the speed at which we are consuming history now, the way that the past, the very recent past, is being made into a version and real-life people walking around have to live with their representatives and so on,” she says, not naming names, but nodding when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s imminent appearance as Boris Johnson in This England. Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 6 July 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, and went on to become a social work assistant in a geriatric hospital. Mantel married the geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972. The couple divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was published in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety. In 1977, Mantel and her husband moved to Botswana, living there for five years. Later, they spent four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.

May, 1536. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, is dead. As the axe drops, Thomas Cromwell emerges from the bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “It is impossible to overstate the significance of the literary legacy Hilary Mantel leaves behind. Her brilliant Wolf Hall trilogy was the crowning achievement in an outstanding body of work. Rest in peace.”

In 1990 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 she was awarded a CBE and in 2014 a DBE. 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.”.