efiggflz‘uzr euer mflr southern england could see some heavy rain. the first batch of rain works its way through the south—east and the next area heads for the south—west during the early hours of sunday. further north, some clearer skies with temperatures falling pretty low, down to around three degrees in glasgow and edinburgh. a touch of frost in parts of scotland. a scattering of showers but further south, more cloud. pretty windy conditions across the south—east with the rain pushing that way and then the rain slowly eases and sunshine works its way from the west in the afternoon. a fairly cool day with temperatures at 1a or 15 at best. it becomes less windy in the south through next week. goodbye. hello, this is bbc news. the headlines: media giant comcast has outbid rupert murdoch's 21st century fox for control of the broadcaster sky after a dramatic auction. the foreign secretary urges eu leaders to "step back

from the abyss" of a no—deal brexit and find a way to make theresa may's proposals work. jeremy corbyn addresses labour's women's conference in liverpool, saying his is the party of equality. gunmen have attacked a military parade in iran — at least 29 people are killed with dozens more injured. president rouhani has promised a "crushing response". and tributes are paid to chas hodges, lead singer of the musical duo chas and dave, who has died at the age of 7a. now on bbc news, man booker prize—winning author dame hilary mantel speaks to rebecca jones, in talking books. hello and welcome to talking books, here at the man booker 50 festival at the southbank centre in london. we've come 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

that you have written. 12 novels, short stories, a memoir, and i was very struck 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, 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 do wonder, though, by resisting categorisation, if you like, did that possibly prevent you building more of an audience earlier in your career? i think possibly it did. it's 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 really predict what i was going to come up

with next, and there's a mixture of the contemporary and the historical, which is probably quite unusual, i agree. success, when it came in the form of international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you'd been ignored up till then? i'd always had a good press, but i hadn't had many sales. and that changed. as soon as wolf hall was published, actually, even before the prize shortlistings. 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. so, as you yourself said, in many ways, wolf hall was the turning point. career—wise, yes, it was a huge turning point. not only the domestic sales, but translations, i think, had gone 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. well, 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 did people's attitudes towards you change 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'd feel a little bit sulky, because i'd think, do you know i've 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 two books cover what must be one of the most famous periods in english history, the most talked—about, the most written—about. i think indeed you said to me once it's the british national soap opera, isn't it? yes, it is. 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, then this familiar material defamiliarises itself and it becomes a much more complex and rich story than the one that we're used to from our schooldays. it's the most remarkable career, and it's the arc of it. you know, 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 litigants, "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 on 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, and you make a much more sympathetic character, dare i say it, even 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 hard—headed.

he was ruthless. but i think no more so than the typical courtier of his time. but he was a lot smarter. yes. so it is your view that the historians have got it wrong? not all of them. and it's interesting sometimes to see what 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. we are not looking at him, we are looking in a mirror. you explain that very well. i think that's a very interesting point. how and when did you become interested in him? because you'd 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'll 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, were you? 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. because that wasn't the original plan. you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. so 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. but with no connections and no money... it was very 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 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, on 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're ready to go. so are you telling me that if you hadn't been ill, you wouldn't 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 perhaps i would have come to writing at a later stage. but then it wouldn't have been the same book, because i would have been a different self. yes. and of course you drew on those experiences in botswana and later in saudi arabia in novels that you did write. yes, 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. so that was a historical novel of a kind. and then i wrote eight months 0n ghazzah street, set in saudi arabia, reflecting my four years there. we've touched upon your illness, and as you say, 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've created the children you never had in your fiction? it would be 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 this french revolution book — this epic 800—page novel,

which was finally published, a place of greater safety, although it was previously rejected by publishers, wasn't, and 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 turning 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, i thought, a contemporary novel, short, funny. if that doesn't take, i would've thought i was deluding myself and stopped.

but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing, was very rocky. i mean, 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 start 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. 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 the 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 — starts you off on a new trail. so you think, right, this is the background music to this scene. i will quote the song and henry will sing it, and you change the mood, you know? or you decide to describe an event through describing a painting, and it cuts through the complexities. and so you are 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 that there are themes 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 are transitory, and doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was powerfully true to me as a small child. i think i lost 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, that's 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. yes. 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. and 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. there are short stories i want to get going on, i have ideas for two or three more novels, and i'm going to have to make some hard choices, i think. hilary mantel, thank you so much. thank you. good evening. saturday brought us a

day of mixed fortunes in terms of the weather. quite a lot of cloud and outbreaks of rain over the southern half of the uk. this was the picture in rye in east sussex earlier today. but this picture was taken in east lothian — clear blue skies there. the cloud has been streaming in across the southern half of the country. we are set to see more of the cloud with further outbreaks of rain in the south. you can see the first batch of rain clears the south—east coast and the next area works in to the south—west later tonight. colder under those clearer skies with a few showers, particularly to the north—west of

scotland, but they could be a touch of frost, and you can see the blue colours indicating the coldest temperatures in the morning. temperatures not far from freezing across scotland, northern england and northern ireland, too. high pressure sitting out towards the north—west but here is the pressure set to bring some rain. heavy rain across south wales and the south—west of england and then pushing eastwards through the day. some fairly heavy spells of rain for a time over the south east with gusty winds as well. possibly as strong as 50 miles an hour over some of the exposed coasts in the south—east. further north and west, a different story. clearer skies with a scattering of showers and sunshine across wales and northern ireland as well. some of the showers could be heavier later on with the odd rumble of thunder but a chilly feel to the weather through the day on sunday with the breeze.

temperatures between 11 to 15. we've lost the wet weather during the course of sunday evening and then things quietened down into the new working week. a few showers around on sunday night and on into monday but high pressure starts to build in from the west, so to start the new working week, high—pressure moving m, working week, high—pressure moving in, won't be as wet and won't be as windy as we've seen through the course of this week. a bit of rain and fairly breezy and the far north and fairly breezy and the far north and north—west. warmer, brighter and drier in the south. goodbye for now. this is bbc world news today. i'm lewes vaughan—jones, our top stories. the woman who accuses supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh of sexual assault has agreed to testify against him. christine blasey ford will appear before the senatejudiciary committee next week to answer questions about the alleged attack. gunmen attack a military parade

in iran, killing at least 29 people. president rouhani promises a "crushing response". a man is rescued from the ferry that capsized in tanzania two days ago, with the loss of over 200 lives. he reportedly survived in an air pocket. america's biggest cable network comcast submits the winning bid for british broadcaster sky, ending a dramatic two—year battle with 21st century fox.