Bringing up the bodies

The Reith Lectures RADIO Radio 4 Tuesday 13 June

According to George MacBeth’s poem The Cleaver Garden, “All crib from skulls and bones who push the pen/Readers crave bodies”. It’s a quote Wolf Hall novelist Hilary Mantel draws on when discussing how, in historical fiction, the dead take on a new, simulated life.

Over five lectures Mantel explores such issues, and also how we police our own imaginations so that we don’t stray into areas where myth, collective memory and fact get dangerously muddled. See our interview with Hilary Mantel on page 25