![]() ![]() ![]() “A head is heavier than you might expect,” the executioner notes drolly, as one of Anne’s attendants swaddles the severed remains in linen to carry away for burial. Dense with resonant metaphors and alive with discomfiting ideas, The Mirror and the Light provides a fittingly Shakespearean resolution to Mantel’s magisterial work. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. It’s doubtful the so-called Calais Executioner, the foreigner brought in to separate the Queen’s skull from her neck, would have ranked highly on Priti Patel’s points-based immigration system. ![]() She was killed by a hired Frenchman, who used a sword made of Toledo steel from Spain. The Mirror & The Light opens with the execution of Anne Boleyn in May 1536. The portrait of Thomas Cromwell that started with Wolf Hall (2009) and continued with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) – both Booker Prize-winning novels – concludes with another masterpiece of historical fiction. ![]() From the razor-sharp opening paragraph to the dramatic ending 863 pages later, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & The Light is superb, right to the last crimson drop. ![]()
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