Craig MacIntosh's Blog - Posts Tagged "hilary-mantel-com"

Life’s unexpected turns taken in the pursuit of something often drops gems in our hand if we’re alert enough to recognize it as such. For me it was writer Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and 2012’s Bring Up The Bodies. I found this extraordinary wordsmith while writing a review of Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King. Spencer had written about the fates of men who signed King Charles I’s death writ in 1649, after the English Civil war. I stumbled across Hilary Mantel’s work—that gem in hand—while writing my review. Intrigued, I read an interview with her, and then followed that with an excerpt from Bring Up The Bodies, her story of Anne Boleyn’s fate at the hands of her philandering husband, Henry VIII. She has leapfrogged to the top of my “must read” authors list. This brief description of the scaffold scene in which a wooden chest is quickly requisitioned to serve as a coffin for the executed queen shows what command of words Mantel has!
He has not thought of a coffin, but an elm chest for arrows has been hastily emptied and carried to the scene of the carnage. Yesterday it was bound for Ireland with its freight, each shaft ready to deal separate, lonely damage. Now it is an object of public gaze, a death casket, wide enough for the queen's little body. Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up The Bodies”