Memoir of my former self: a life in writing. Hilary Mantel. 2023.

As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Mantel discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging: the mythic legacy of Princess Diana: the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England - and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him: she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and about her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy. Here too, is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry met Sally to Robocop - and published for the first time, her stunning Reith Lectures on the art of bringing history and the dead back to life.