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| Subtitle | A Novel |
| First Written | 2009 |
| Genre | Historical Fiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Henry Holt & Co |
| ISBN-10 | 0805080686 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0805080681 |
| My Copy | library hardback |
| First Read | December 14, 2012 |
Wolf Hall
Really, its amazing: she starts out by taking a historically reviled character, and throwing you into the deep end of empathy for him - an abusive father, a lost childhood roaming thru europe, a destructive sense of loyalty to his master, losing his wife and children to a sudden sickness. You think the guy's an angel after 100 pages, but then by the end of the book he's burning people at the stake and you're still rooting for him.
Noted on July 2, 2016
Re-reading this again in 2016, and still shocked at how good it is. It would be one trick to just write a book that's so glowing and generous. But to combine this loveliness with a character that's so historically unlovable, that's a whole 'nother trick.
Noted on July 2, 2016
Mantel does a great job working in surprising historical details subtly. She doesn't bludgeon you in the face with the fact that people at the time ate with their hands; instead she has a hostess tempt someone to a party by saying, 'We'll use forks.'
Noted on January 24, 2013
This is an amazing book. I'm not one for historical fiction, but Mantel does an amazing job painting a portrait of Cromwell and his time. It's rich with detail, and everyone in it - everyone feels human and fully drawn. I don't know my Tudor history, so it was fun to be surprised by the basic plot developments.
Noted on January 24, 2013
It's easy to employ some child who will total the columns and push them under your nose, get them initialed and then lock them in a chest. But what's the point of that? The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It's not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it's there to open your heart to possibility. It's like the scriptures: it's there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbor. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
His hand skims the surface, rich and soft. The flaw in the weave hardly matters. A turkey carpet is not an oath. There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person. He wold not allow, for example, a careless ambiguity in a lease, but instinct tells him that sometimes a contract need not be drawn too tight. Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.
Quoted on January 24, 2013
Arrange your face.
Quoted on June 23, 2016
There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an ax when you take it into your hand. You can strike, you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
She is lonely, he thinks, and breeding a savage heart.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?
Quoted on June 15, 2016
Clerics can do this: speak about your character. Give verdicts.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
His daughters are now in Purgatory, a country of slow fires and ridged ice. Where in the Gospels does it say ‘Purgatory’?
Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.
He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
They can stumble through a Latin prayer, but when you say, ‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means, master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
What went wrong was an accident of timing only. If the cardinal had not moved so fast; if he had not been so edgy, not knowing how he could signal to him to be less despotic to Boleyn. The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt – ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.
Quoted on June 15, 2016
He raises his glass, looks over the rim. ‘Picture to yourself, Tom. Imagine this. You are a man of some thirty-five years of age. You are in good health and of a hearty appetite, you have your bowels opened every day, your joints are supple, your bones support you, and in addition you are King of England. But." He shakes his head. "But!"
Quoted on June 15, 2016
The heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Quoted on January 24, 2013
But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Quoted on January 24, 2013
And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.
Quoted on January 24, 2013
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Quoted on January 24, 2013