Those wacky Tudors
Photo: Armour of Henry VIII at the Dressed to Kill exhibition, Tower of London. The large codpiece was propaganda for Henry’s virility. Of course one of Henry’s successors had the biggest brass balls of the period. Her name was Elizabeth I.
Hilary Mantel has won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, a historical novel about Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser/fixer Thomas Cromwell. According to broadcaster Jim Naughtie, who chaired the judging panel, their decision was “based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.”
There’s an excerpt from Wolf Hall in the New York Review of Books.
Guardian interview with Hilary Mantel: “I accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off.”
In other Tudor news: Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery with five men, including her brother. Was it a stitch-up or was there some truth in the charges? Jessie Childs reviews Alison Weir’s The Lady In The Tower in Literary Review.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
