'Any activity he finds wearying or displeasant, he will try honestly to turn into an amusement, and if he cannot find some thread of pleasure he will avoid it this to him seems reasonable and natural. One can easily imagine so many figures of our current moment to whom this would apply, but this description of the tyrannical, capricious, manchild element of Henry VIII, as seen by the calculating Cromwell, is worth quoting at length: One passage in particular achieves that timeless truth that great fiction discovers and teases out in archetypal fashion. This is just plain great writing and another worthy Booker-Prize-winning contribution to the series. The build up to the charges leveled against Anne Boleyn and her, 'accomplices,' is some of the most compelling writing eclipsed only by the relentlessly cold and Janus-faced interrogations conducted by Cromwell himself.

His sedulous enabling of the murderous capriciousness of his boss is magnificently realized in Mantel's prose and at all times this is a gripping tale no matter how well you already know the historical events it describes.īefore Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of Cromwell, these works from Mantel were some of the strongest biographical work available on this elusive figures, even if they were realized in dramatized fashion. Having seen the ascendance of Thomas Cromwell to the position of Master Secretary to Henry VIII through his dutiful machinations in legitimizing the King's marriage to Anne Boleyn, spoiler alert, its now his job, as chronicled in this volume, to undo that very marriage.

Volume 2 in the Wolf Hall trilogy, 'Bring up the Bodies,' is everything its illustrious predecessor is and continues Hilary Mantel's tripartite masterpiece of historical fiction.

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