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Lead book review

Knowing Thomas Cromwell’s fate only increases the tension: The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel, reviewed

In 1540, he, himself, Lord Cromwell fell victim to the king’s caprice. His execution brings to a close one of English literature’s great trilogies, says Mark Lawson

7 March 2020

9:00 AM

7 March 2020

9:00 AM

The Mirror & the Light Hilary Mantel

4th Estate, pp.883, 25

When the judges for the 1992 Booker Prize received Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, an 800-page novel set during the French Revolution seemed a quirky diversion from the work of a novelist then most associated with shortish dark comedies of contemporary or recent life, such as Fludd (1989), featuring a weird Catholic priest, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), in which an Englishwoman suffers Saudi Arabian culture shock.

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