SOURCE: “To the Pith of London's Heart,” in New York Review of Books, October 8, 1998, pp. 12–15.

In the following favorable review, Bayley compares Mantel's historical imagination and narrative style to Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Swift, and Peter Ackroyd.

Inveterate novel-readers, not a common tribe today, can still be both fascinated and comforted by a vision of history, and by a novel confident enough to supply one. Sir Walter Scott's is still a potent spirit, although his novels, once in the background of every literate mind that loved the past, may nowadays hardly be read. He handed on the torch to unlikely runners: Virginia Woolf for instance, who in Orlando and Between the Acts strove to visualize history in feminine terms, in records not researched but imagined, in moments that once collapsed into nothing, as our own are doing now from day to day, in mute lives in the shadow...