The Spectator’s Notes | 21 February 2013

People are quite often pilloried for saying the opposite of what they actually said. I have read Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture, and she is quite clearly not attacking the Duchess of Cambridge, but criticising what it is that people try to turn royal women into. When she speaks of the Duchess as ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung’, or ‘the spindles of her limbs’ being ‘hand-turned and gloss-varnished’, she is talking about what the media and public opinion want of her. She discusses appearance, and offers no opinion about the young woman’s reality. She is sympathising with a female predicament, and she does the same about Diana, Princess of Wales, the present Queen, Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette. Indeed she makes an appeal: ‘I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.’ So are the Prime Minister, Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail plumb-wrong in attacking our great novelist? Oddly enough, not quite.