The Wolf Hall Picture Book

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Some immensely striking and suggestive images followed: a ghostly hound in Richmond Park, which brought to mind Cromwell’s memories of dogs circling, scenting burned flesh; Boleyn’s robes, laid out on a table like a shroud in Lambeth Palace; a curling tong lying plugged in on the floor during filming at Cromwell’s mansion in the City of London, Austin Friars, looking for all the world like an instrument of torture. There it is again – the interplay between the past and the present day. Mantel is preparing to leave Devon to set up home with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month, having previously expressed her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. She has become a byword for a particular kind of intensely-felt, brilliantly subtle exploration of the past.

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 Very few writers manage not just to excavate the sedimented remains of the past, but bring them up again into the light and air so that they shine brightly once more before us. Hilary Mantel has done just that’ Simon Schama, Financial Times

The first half of the novel, built around Wolsey's fall from power, details Cromwell's domestic setup at Austin Friars and introduces the major players in Tudor politics. Without clobbering the reader with the weight of her research, Mantel works up a 16th-century world in which only a joker would call for cherries in April or lettuce in December, and where hearing an unlicensed preacher is an illicit thrill on a par with risking syphilis. The civil wars that brought the Tudors to the throne still make older people shudder, bringing Henry's obsession with producing a male heir into focus. And the precarious nature of early modern life is brought home by the abrupt deaths of Cromwell's wife and daughters, carried off by successive epidemics in moving but unsentimentally staged scenes. Cromwell asks if he can bury his elder daughter with a copybook she's written her name in; "the priest says he has never heard of such a thing". Reuniting the creative team from the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning first series, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will be directed by seven-time BAFTA award winner Peter Kosminsky (The Undeclared War, The State), adapted for television by Academy award nominee Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Frank) and produced by Colin Callender’s Playground (The Undeclared War, All Creatures Great and Small) and Company Pictures (Van Der Valk, Blood). Today, Mantel says she is alive to the danger of drawing shallow links with present-day politics and society. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison’ The Times

The BBC andMasterpiece PBS have announced that Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s multi award-winning trilogy, will begin filming shortly.The six-part series will air on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK. To date the Wolf Hall trilogy has sold more than five million copies worldwide and has been translated into 41 languages. Earlier this month HarperCollins published The Wolf Hall Picture Book, a photography book by Mantel and co-authors Ben Miles and George Miles.

In The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell recalls the same scene years later. The main action is identical but he remembers himself as more vulnerable. A threatening man, who wasn’t in the first memory, crushes the young Cromwell’s hand. People are crammed together, and the stench of burning flesh is so strong they vomit at their feet. 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. Hilary Mantel with Ben Miles (centre), an actor, and his brother, George, a photographer, with whom she collaborated to create The Wolf Hall Picture Book. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

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. For all its structural and thematic importance, however, Cromwell's conflict with More is only part of a wider battle caused by Henry's desire to have his first marriage annulled. Much space is given over to court politics, which Mantel manages to make comprehensible without downplaying its considerable complexity. Central figures - the Boleyn sisters, Catherine of Aragon, the young Mary Tudor, the king himself - are brought plausibly to life, as are Cromwell's wife, Liz Wykys, and Cardinal Wolsey. Determined, controlled but occasionally impulsive, and a talented hater, Mantel's Anne Boleyn is a more formidable character even than her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, portrayed here as a scheming old warhorse who rattles a bit when he moves on account of all the relics and holy medals concealed about his person. A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy

Hers are books that refuse to shy away from the underside of life … Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers’ Olivia Laing, Observer At that stage, with The Mirror and the Light, the third in her trilogy, still several years from completion, “there was a long, long way to go. And, for me, it was just the refreshment I needed. It was more than a supplement, it was something really essential that I needed to do,” she says. 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. Though best known as a historical novelist, Mantel was less concerned with history than with its shape-shifting relative, recollection. Between her dazzling scholarship and frequent hilarity of her dialogue lay her true subject: “the operation”, as she once phrased it, “of memory”. Succeeds brilliantly in every particle … it’s an imaginative achievement to exhaust superlatives’ Spectator