Shortly after Hilary Mantel’s name was announced as the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, a smiling acquaintance hove into view with profuse congratulations. ‘Now this person dislikes me and my work,’ explains Mantel to me a few weeks later, ‘so the moment had a particularly strained quality. I thought to myself “I’m going to remember this moment and use it later.”’

The ghastly grimace which Mantel describes will, she thinks, most likely pop up in the sequel to Wolf Hall on which she is currently working. Certainly it would fit with the atmosphere of high politics and low cunning that permeates her prize-winning account of Thomas Cromwell’s ascent to