In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ÔI have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.Õ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next.Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, BritainÕs last witch.