Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-Winning author for her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies perhaps wouldn’t be the biggest fan of the pregnant Princess. The author divulged her very honest opinion at a lecture hosted by the London Review of Books on Royal Bodies at the British Museum. We’re sure there were a few neck pulls when she started this rant!
During the hour long speech on the modern Royal family, Mantel commented: “She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.”
The suggestion would seem that Kate had been chosen to be William’s bride as she was easy to mould: “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”
Mantel with her Booker prize-winning novel.
Perhaps the greatest insult at the event was the comparison of the princess with a: “shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore”, and a “jointed doll on which certain rags were hung.”
Addressing the issue of the Windsors in general, Mantel remarked that they were like pandas – “expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at?”
The London Review of Books have since reproduced the entire transcript on their website which you can read here.
Supporters of the Royal family have been enraged by the comments, Ingrid Seward, editor-in-Chief of Majesty magazine, noted the comments were unfair: “‘They have to be nice to everyone. They are probably stupefyingly bored but they can’t appear to be having anything other than a nice time.’
It seems bikinis are the least of your worries Kate, eh?
