The grand-sounding title and subtitle of this book, published a year after Hilary Mantel’s death, make it out to be a sort of autobiography. In fact it’s a bran tub, an odds-and-sods collection of Mantel’s journalism from 1987 to 2017, mostly shorter and less formal than the essays collected in Mantel Pieces. No, it is not a memoir, but a writer leaves an impression of themselves on every page, in both the events they recount and the ideas they...

HILARY MANTEL In this extract from her final book, ‘A Memoir of My Former Self,’ the two-time Booker Prize winner explains how she wanted to create a sense of history listening and talking to itself, and reveals her relish for Thomas Cromwell’s company. ‘Show up at the desk’ is one of the first rules of writing, but for Wolf Hall, I was about 30 years late. When I began writing, in the 1970s, I thought of myself simply as a historical novelist;...