Worth the pronoun trouble.

Everybody wants to talk about the pronouns. Fine: yes, "He, Cromwell" is a genuine difficulty, yes, there are paragraphs where you have to reverse two sentences to establish who is speaking, and no, Mantel does not always solve it. She adjusted it slightly in the sequels. The reason it's worth the friction is that the technique puts you inside a man whom nobody in the room ever names without contempt, and who has therefore become, in his own head, simply he.

What I actually admire is the research discipline. Historical novelists usually betray themselves in one of two ways: they explain things nobody in the scene would need explained, or they give a sixteenth-century person a twentieth-century interior. She does neither. Cromwell's Protestantism is not modern liberalism in fancy dress; it is a specific, dangerous, book-smuggling conviction about scripture, and it costs him things.

More was always going to be the argument, so I'll take my side of it. The novel is unfair to him, deliberately and knowingly unfair, and the unfairness is a corrective to Bolt's Man for All Seasons, which was itself unfair in the other direction. Two distortions do not make a portrait. But Mantel's More burns people, which is true, and Bolt's does not mention it, which is a lie of omission, so I know which unfairness I prefer.

The Fourth Estate hardback is a good object. The cast list printed before chapter one is essential; I consulted it constantly at the start and stopped needing it about a quarter of the way in.

Nine. The Anne Boleyn material towards the end is the weakest thing here and it improves enormously in Bring Up the Bodies.