The man who invented modernity Marcus Nevitt

The final moments of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall see its central protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, trying to banish ghosts. Assailed by memories of his orchestration of the execution of his rival Thomas More, the sight of his head on a block, the ‘sickening sound of the axe on flesh’, Cromwell turns to two sources of solace to improve his mood: the welfare of his household and — oddly, but characteristically —admin. In order to give us a Cromwell who is so much more than an insanely ambitious judicial murderer, Mantel leaves her readers with her protagonist fretting over the future happiness of his recently married secretary Ralph Sadler at the same time as he plots the precise detail of Henry VIII’s imminent progress to Bristol with real care and exactitude.

There is something of this determination to bring the quirks, warmth and light out of the dark material traces of Cromwell’s character in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s captivating and definitive new biography of Henry VIII’s most controversial of royal counsellors.