Hilary Mantel hits a rare rough patch with critics

Although Hilary Mantel has won the Booker Prize twice, her books do not always go down well.

The Oldie magazine recently asked 32 of its contributors how they got on with her first winner, Wolf Hall. Only five of them were able to get through it.

“I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole — it’s too long, and written in the present tense,” says commissioning editor Jeremy Lewis, a biographer himself. “If I wanted to learn about Thomas Cromwell (which I don’t) I’d rather read a Tudor historian.”