fir i‘aii 3“? i‘m ene thin and break. some bright and sunny spells coming through. wind is not as strong as they have been, on the western isles lighter winds. they extend down into northern ireland but still some gusty winds in western and southern coasts. easing down through the afternoon. the best of any brightness and sunshine, temperatures of between 23 and 25 degrees. a cooler 15 or 16 across scotland. we should cease and sunshine. the odd spot of rain in trent bridge today but today it should be mainly drive. a lot of cloud, breakthrough the afternoon. overnight, a similar picture. a lot of cloud, it thins and breaks. some clear spells but also misty and murky conditions on western coasts. patches of drizzle, a muggy night in northern ireland, england and wales. those between 13 and 17 degrees. cooler in scotland with clear skies. here is the bigger picture, notice how the isobars are quite wide apart by this stage. lighter winds on

monday. weather fronts close by. by this stage. lighter winds on monday. weatherfronts close by. it looks as though we will still see some showers from those. shower distribution further south. affecting parts of northern ireland, southern scotland and into northern england. some showers, they filter into northern england and wales. a largely dry day. cloud will then and break to allow spells of sunshine. temperatures between 20 and 25 degrees in england and wales. cooler in northern ireland and scotland. on tuesday, those showers become more frequent across northern ireland, western and northern scotland, bringing heavy spells of rain for some time. scattered showers further south but much of england and wales with a mainly dry day and more in the way of sunshine on tuesday. still maintaining a warm and humid deal with temperatures of 25 or 26 degrees. cloudy and humid to start the week, some sunny spells and slowly turning pressure from the north. hello.

this is bbc news with ben brown. the headlines: a man has been charged with attempted murder after a car crashed outside the houses of parliament earlier this week. the incident is being treated as a terrorist attack. india's military intensifies its rescue operations in the flood—hit southern state of kerala. at least 350 people have died. many people are still trapped in the houses in many places. i hope they get the help very soon. we couldn't stay there any more. i am thankful to the people who brought us out of that. the boss of the fashion label superdry has given a £1 million donation to the campaign for another eu referendum. now on bbc news, time for talking books.

welcome to talking books. we've come here to talk to dame hilary mantel, the only woman to have won the man booker prize for fiction twice for her bestselling historical novels wolf hall and bring up the bodies. her otherfiction may take you by surprise, with books about ghosts, the supernatural, and the french revolution. the world of course eagerly awaits the final instalment of her hugely successful thomas cromwell trilogy, the mirror and the light. hilary mantel, welcome

to talking books. we will come to the mirror and the light in due course. but i want to start with the books you have written. 12 novels, short stories, a memoir, and i was very struck by how very different they are — from 800 pages on the french revolution to performing psychics in suburbia, your subjects are unpredictable. how deliberate is that? it's not really deliberate. it's just i don't know how people manage to write the same book over and over again, because you grow and you change, your interests change. although to me there are subterranean threads that connect them, however disparate the subject matter may seem to be. i wonder if by resisting categorisation, did that potentially prevent you building more of an audience

earlier in your career? i think possibly it did. it is tempting for publishers and readers to want to put an author into a category. and to that extent they want to be served the mixture as before. and as you say, you couldn't predict what i was going to come up with next, and there's a mixture of the contemporary and the historical, which i agree is probably quite unusual. success, when it came in the form of international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you had been ignored til then? i had always had good press, but not many sales. that changed. as soon as wolf hall was published, actually, even before the prize short listings. and i felt i hadn't pushed out my talent to find where it might go. so i still felt like a work in progress. as you yourself said, in many ways wolf hall

was the turning point. careerwise, yes, it was a huge turning point. not only in domestic sales, but translations. i think it went into 36, 37 languages. and it's just amazing to think that people on the four corners of the earth are reading about henry viii and his wives. what you did was follow up with another man booker winner in 2012, didn't you, with bring up the bodies? yes. i did wonder how people's attitudes towards you changed after those two victories. do you know, a lot of people thought they were my first books. and lovely, well—meaning people, women mainly, would rush up to me and say, "how wonderful you did all this in your 50s." and i would feel a little bit sulky, because i would think, "you know, i have been writing since i was 22.

i wrote for 12 years before i was published. and that is a more typical career. but people love the idea of an overnight success. wolf hall and bring up the bodies, these books cover what must be the most famous periods in english history, the most talked about, the most written about. i think you said to me once it's the british national soap opera, isn't it? what did you think you could add that was new? cromwell is vital to understanding the crucial ten years of henry's reign. and if you stand where he is standing, this familiar material defamiliarises itself and it becomes a much more complex and rich story than the one we are used to from our schooldays. it is the most remarkable career, and it's the arc of it. the son of the brewer,

blacksmith from putney, rising to become earl of essex. you have to ask yourself how is that done? thomas cromwell, people say, that's an ingenious man. do you know he has the whole of the new testament by heart? he is the very man if an argument about god breaks out. he's the very man for telling your tenants 12 good reasons why their rents are fair. he's the man to cut through some legal entanglement that's ensnared you for three generations. or talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make. with animals, women, and timid little ones, his manner is gentle and easy.

but he makes your creditors weep. he can converse with you about the caesars, or get you venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. nobody can out—talk him, if he wants to talk. nobody can better keep their head when markets are falling and weeping men are standing in the street tearing up letters of credit. "liz", he says to his wife one night, "i believe in a year or two, we'll be rich." thank you. in the novels you challenge the traditional view of cromwell. he was always depicted as a villain, but you make him a much more sympathetic character, dare i say it, quite beguiling. so what was it that you discovered to contradict that traditional view?

well, i discovered a lot of rubbish, really. errors and prejudices just being kicked along from one generation of historians to the next. in many ways he deserves his reputation. he was ambitious and unscrupulous. he was hardheaded. he was ruthless. but i think no more so than the typical courtier of his time. but he was a lot smarter. so it is your view the historians have got it wrong? not all of them. it is interesting sometimes to see what a novelist gets or takes away from a simple piece of documentation that a historian may not notice. but how historically accurate do you feel you have to be? i think you have to be absolutely accurate, as far as the record extends. but of course you have to be challenging the record and you have to be saying, "who wrote this down and what

was his source of information?" so in that sense you're getting behind the record. but i think in cromwell‘s case, certainly, you have to be very suspicious of secondary sources. you see, to the elizabethans, cromwell was a hero. by the time we got to the victorians he was a villain. so something happened at some stage in between, and he is a reflection, like most historical figures, of the times that are seeing him. we are not looking at him, we are looking in a mirror. you explain that very well. i think that is a very interesting point. how and when did you become interested in him? because you had wanted to write about him since the start of your career, hadn't you? i began work on a historical novel when i was very young, 22, not long out of university. and i really saw myself as a historical novelist, and i thought, right, first i will do the french revolution and then i will turn my

mind to thomas cromwell. and of course it doesn't work like that. no one's career is that smooth. and just as well, because i could write about the french revolution then. it was made by young men and women. i was even younger than they were. mostly they were dead by their mid—30s. you were 22? i was in my 20s and 30s when i was working on the book. and i could recognise their spirit and their hope and their commitment and energy. i couldn't write that book now. but i can write about a man in his 50s building up and accumulating his life's experience. so i think, you know, the time when you get an idea for a book, that isn't necessarily the time to execute it. sometimes you have to wait a couple of decades and then pick your moment to strike.

2003, and your memoir, giving up the ghost, in which you write about your childhood, growing up in the 1950s in northern england, but you also explain how you came to be a writer. that wasn't the original plan, was it? you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. what happened ? yes, never under—ambitious! ithink... it's difficult, you know? a woman from a working—class background with no connections trying to get into law at that time... i wasn't even interested in being a solicitor, i wanted to be a barrister. i wanted to come to london and the centre of things. with no connections or money, it was difficult in those days.

but also i had health problems. i had an undiagnosed illness. but i was told that i was imagining it all. but by the time i was 21, i really had a sensation of doors closing on me. and a feeling that i wasn't going to be able to make a professional career, that my health was in my way, and so i thought, "well, i'd better have something that i'm in charge of." and i still had to work, of course. i still had a job, but i began writing in the evenings, the weekends, and i set my stall out for a big novel that i knew would take many years. but that's the beauty of being 22, because the time just stretches ahead of you. and i still had no connections, and i didn't know anybody who was a writer. but what do you need? well, you need a piece of paper and a pencil and you are ready to go. so are you telling me that if you

hadn't been ill, you would not have become a writer? i certainly wouldn't have taken the decision at that precise time. i think possibly i would have made my way back to writing when i was living abroad, during which time i didn't have any meaningful career, so i think i would have come to writing at a later stage. but that wouldn't have been the same book, because it would have been a different self. yes. and of course you drew on your experiences in botswana and saudi arabia in novels that you did write. that's right. in a change of climate. i wrote about southern africa, although at an earlier era. i wrote about it in the 1950s. that was a historical novel of a kind. and then i wrote a book called eight months on ghazzah street, set in saudi arabia,

reflecting my four years there. we've touched upon your illness, and as you said, it was undiagnosed for many years, and eventually you were diagnosed with endometriosis. that rendered you infertile. i was very struck by a line in giving up the ghost. you wrote "i miss the child i never had. what's to be done but to write them into being?" is it fair to say you have created the children you never had in your fiction? it would be more fair to say i've created lives. they're more like a great tribe of brothers and sisters, i think. your people, your world. you realise you only have one life to live and you want to try on for size all the other lives. and you want to move into different eras and you want to live in a man's body for a while, and all these things writing enables you to do. you mention the french revolution

book, this epic 800 page novel which was finally published, a place of greater safety, although it was previously rejected by publishers. that must have been difficult, was it? it seemed that someone who would write such a book must be someone of tremendous authority, someone we had heard of from oxford or cambridge. and it wasjust little me. and i don't think people could get their heads around it. they didn't know what it was. and thankfully what i did, instead of going around every publisher in london with it, ijust said, "stop, this isn't the time, go away, write another book, do the best you can, but make it completely different."

which was every day is mother's day. yes, a contemporary novel, short, funny. if that doesn't take, maybe i'm deluding myself and i'll stop. but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing, was very rocky. my morale sank sometimes. i needed a lot of self belief to keep going. but once every day is mother's day hit the right desk, and that was the desk of the literary agent who still looks after me, everything went swimmingly. comparatively. yes. and finally, a place of greater safety was published. it was, and it won the sunday express book of the year prize. and i felt vindicated, in a sense. i mean, you started a huge epic about the french revolution. where does one start? well, manchester was my only choice. between the central reference library and the university,

there was a very good collection of material and i simply read everything i could get my hands on. i was short on primary sources, but what i got were armfuls of gossipy victorian biographies. victorian—era biographies. which provide all the colour, the anecdotes, the personalities, and i built up from there. i've seen the binders and folders of research notes that you have, labelled "people," "places," "customs," "manners." at what point as a writer do you say, "i've done enough research now, i need to start writing"? well, to me, the two things are entwined. you know... you start them together, you run them together, and until you come into

a particular scene you may not know what you need to know. or it may be that some little piece of information that comes your way, and it need not be information, you might see a picture or hear some music, and it starts you off on a new trail. and you think, "right, this is the background music to this scene." i will quote the song and henry will sing it and change the mood, you know? and you start to describe your event through describing a painting, and it cuts through the complexities. and so you're always looking, not just for information from the historical record, but for a cultural context that will help you frame a scene. and i think that never stops. then a little later came another

completely different novel, beyond black. you mentioned at the very beginning there are things you return to in your books, and this theme of the supernatural is one of those. so where did this interest in a world beyond ours come from? probably from being brought up as a roman catholic. as a child you're quite convinced that there is another unseen reality that is more potent than this one. and that this world is actually the illusion, something in which you're transitory, and it doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was powerfully true to me as a smaller child.

i think i lost a sense of it as i grew up and moved away from the church. but that sense of another reality sitting on your shoulder where your guardian angel is supposed to be is very powerful in my life. i really feel the dead are only a whisper away. do you believe in ghosts? i know about ghosts! i have to believe in ghosts. beyond black, which is a contemporary novel, and takes place mostly within the m25, is actually a kind of work—up for the tudor novels, because it's all about the dead who won't lie down. the dead are on every page of that book, nattering away about all sorts of banal topics. and the whole theme of talking to the dead and being available

to them, i was actually setting the schedule for my next 15 years of work, but i didn't know it at the time. which brings us very neatly to the mirror and the light, the eagerly anticipated final instalment in your thomas cromwell trilogy. so how is it going? it's going well. it's just suddenly taken a leap forward, and just last week i could email my editor and say, "since i emailed you last week, i have done 12,000 words, and they are good words." 12,000 words is nothing, but you suddenly think, "now, this project, it's pulling away from its moorings, you know?" it really wants to be written. and i think i'm probably entering into the most frenzied but also, in a way, the most pleasurable phase

of the writing, where it seems to have taken charge and it's doing it itself. can you envisage a writing life beyond thomas cromwell now? there's so much i want to do. notjust in prose but maybe in the theatre as well. and it's just a question of how much stamina have i got? what time have i got left? each project takes years to realise. so i have to have a long think. short stories i want to get going on. i have ideas for two or three more novels, and i am going to have to make some hard choices, i think. hillary mantel, thank you so much. thank you. hello.

once again sunshine is in fairly short supply today. most of us will keep quite large amounts of cloud and at times, outbreaks of rain continuing across northern england. in parts of wales too. it clears eastwards but we will be left with a lot of cloud, that could bring one or two showers through the afternoon. equally, that cloud will try to thin and break. some bright and sunny spells coming through. winds not as strong as yesterday, especially on the western isles lighter winds. they extend down into northern ireland but still some gusty winds in western and southern coasts. easing down through the afternoon.

in the best of any brightness and sunshine, temperatures of between 23 and 25 degrees. 18 under cloud. a cooler 15 or 16 across scotland. we should see some sunshine. the odd spot of rain at trent bridge today but today it should be mainly dry. a lot of cloud, breaks through this afternoon. overnight, a similar picture. a lot of cloud, it thins and breaks. some clear spells but also misty and murky conditions on western coasts. patches of drizzle, a muggy night in northern ireland, england and wales. those between 13 and 17 degrees. cooler in scotland with clear skies. here is the bigger picture, notice how the isobars are quite wide apart by this stage. lighter winds on monday. weather fronts close by. it looks as though we will still see some showers from those. shower distribution further south than we thought yesterday. affecting parts of northern ireland,

southern scotland and into northern england. some showers, they filter into northern england and wales. a largely dry day. cloud will thin and break to allow spells of sunshine. temperatures between 20 and 25 degrees in england and wales. cooler in northern ireland and scotland. on tuesday, those showers become more frequent across northern ireland, western and northern scotland, bringing heavier spells of rain for a time. scattered showers further south but much of england and wales with a mainly dry day and more in the way of sunshine on tuesday. still maintaining a warm and humid feel with temperatures of 25 or 26 degrees. cloudy and humid to start the week, some sunny spells and slowly turning fresher from the north. this is bbc news. i'm ben brown. the headlines at 11. india's military intensifies its rescue operations in the flood—hit southern state of kerala. almost 200 people have died in the last 10 days.

many people are still trapped in their houses in many places. i hope they get help very soon. we could not stay there any more and i'm thankfulfor the people who brought us out of there. the boss of the fashion label superdry has given a £1 million donation to the campaign for another eu referendum. a man has been charged with attempted murder after a car crashed outside the houses of parliament earlier this week. the incident is being treated as a terrorist attack. as hundreds of thousands of venezuelans flee their crisis—stricken country, there are violent clashes on the brazilian border, and ecuador brings in new rules to stop the flow of migrants.