LETHAL INTRIGUE

Hilary Mantel is perhaps the world’s leading literary sensation. So what’s it like to meet her? In almost every interview I’ve ever transcribed, most of what’s spoken is a mixture of ums and ahs, pauses, grunts, half-finished sentences and all the other detritus of human communication. Two shining exceptions to this rule have been Christopher Hitchens, who spoke in gloriously flowing paragraphs, and Mantel, who speaks much like she writes, in deceptively straightforward sentences that lock together to surprisingly dramatic effect.

Her new book, The Mirror and the Light, is the final part of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. It runs to almost 900 pages, every one of them steeped in the earthy reality and often lethal intrigue of life in the Tudor court of Henry VIII. It’s eight years since its predecessor, Bring Up the Bodies, was published and there has been much speculation about the cause of the lengthy gap.

When we meet in a hotel across the road from the BBC’s headquarters in central London, she’s only “mildly indignant” at the suggestion she’d suffered from writer’s block.

“I was the reverse of blocked,” she says. “I’ve never worked so hard or consistently as I have in the past three years.”

That was the point at which she began tying together years of research, notes and various sketches of scenes. She had a huge weight of documentation to get through and, she says, was determined that the final book carry the previous two and bring all their various threads and subplots to a fitting conclusion.

Mantel’s portrait was so vivid and magnetic that she single-handedly placed Cromwell firmly in the public imagination.

“I didn’t want to compromise my standards,” she says, without sounding grand.

In addition, her mother died two years ago, and she took time off for bereavement and to sort out her estate. “So, to look at it coldly,” she says wryly, “there goes a publishing season.”

A PORTRAIT OF A SHADOWY FIGURE

The trilogy began in 2009 with , which focuses on Henry VIII’s break with Rome, on account of the Catholic Church’s refusal to annul his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon,