SOURCE: “All about Evil,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIII, No. 13, August 8, 1996, pp. 35–6.

In the following favorable review, Annan compares Mantel to Graham Greene and asserts that in An Experiment in Love “her approach is slow and stealthy; the hair on the back of the neck rises, not all of a sudden, but gradually.”

Hilary Mantel has just published a very cross article in The Author, the quarterly journal of the British Society of Authors. She grumbles about the large number of letters she says she gets, all deploring the pessimism of her novels:

They don't, on the whole, have the nerve to assert that the world is a nicer place than I make it out to be. What they are challenging is my need to speak, in such plain terms, of the atrocious and the absurd; they are not complaining about me as a writer...