Mantel Pieces, which includes nearly 30 years of Mantel’s essays for The London Review of Books, accompanied by facsimiles of her correspondence with its editors, is the story of an outsider finding her literary home ... A good third of Mantel Pieces is devoted to kings and queens and courtiers, another third to the revolutionaries who are out to string them up. It’s clear where Mantel’s sympathies lie: Royals are mythic, archaic, 'both gods and beasts,' but it’s their assassins — the stiff-backed, lawyerly, provincial fanatics — whom she loves ... My favorite sentence in this book is uncharacteristically quiet, almost plaintive, let fall sotto voce in the middle of a hospital-bed memory: 'I wonder, though, if there is a little saint you can apply to, if you are a person with holes in them?' ... I suspect we all are people with holes in them, and there are many saints to apply to. For those who feel compelled to examine not just their own 'perforations' but the world’s, St. Hilary is your woman.

Vast and various, the book offers the reader a fascinating vision of the restless intelligence that — in conjuring the Wolf Hall trilogy for which Mantel is most famous — has sustained and entertained so many. But it also functions as a heartening example of the rewards to be found in being undogmatic, curious, alert, roaming ... Occasionally, the manner in which Mantel articulates her thoughts can be inattentive (she has a weakness for phrases like 'swat a book like a fly'; 'droning on and on'; 'cut their losses'). But on the whole this is a work that is brisk and breezy, and further enhanced by her capacity to examine our hearts, register our feelings, and bring up with tenderness the enduring question of our frail and vulnerable bodies.

What Mantel has are much more useful qualities: a researcher’s in-depth grasp of every topic she writes about, fearlessness, originality and robust common sense. Her wide-ranging pieces, spanning three decades, are the best kind of critical writing, rich with recondite knowledge, wearing their learning lightly ... What sets Mantel’s novels apart is also what sets her critical writing apart: an unerring eye for the telling detail, the clue that will unlock what she calls 'the puzzle of personal identity' ... The author is, of course, quite brilliant on the Tudors and the various iterations of Henry VIII, from strapping young prince, through pious apostate to tyrannical Bluebeard ... speak she does, with passion and eloquence, not just about the ills of our bodily existence, but about the one beyond.

Worth buying for the title pun alone, Mantel Pieces brings together three decades’ worth of Hilary Mantel’s criticism in the London Review of Books. Review essays about historical figures including Jane Boleyn, Robespierre and Danton feature alongside pieces on Madonna, the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the killing of Jamie Bulger ... The volume’s standout essay, Royal Bodies, was the subject of some outrage in 2013 because it raised uncomfortable questions about the nation’s voyeuristic relationship with the monarchy. But it has aged well, and will remain pertinent for some time to come.

... brilliantly introduces new fans to her astonishing breadth of interests ... captures Mantel’s remarkable career to date, not in a nostalgic or retrospective way, but in a series of small and large literary explosions that collectively cleanse and brighten both mind and spirit. That may seem a vast description for items usually written to deadline for particular occasions, such as book releases or news events, but their very timelessness within the traditionally short-lived character of journalism speaks to something very special in the way Mantel approaches her subject material ... Mantel’s vivid and often visceral command of language interweaves with the diligent and often exhausting research that flows so close to the surface on every page ... While each essay and review was replete with 'aha moments' that deepened my knowledge of subjects or events that I thought (wrongly) I knew something about, I couldn’t help feeling both humbled and impressed by Mantel’s most personal piece ... There is a riveting in-the-moment quality to her writing that captures vulnerability and courage interacting in very close quarters.

The collection [...] serves as much as a display of Mantel’s shrewd eye and stylish prose as a testimony to her long, fruitful association with the LRB. Her reviews are capacious, erudite, well informed, and exacting ... A captivating collection.