Hilary Mantel: a Queen in a court of her own Her descriptions are swift and evocative: Anne Boleyn is "the king's quicksilver darling" who "retains her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places." Her use of historical material is seamless: Henry finds in his pocket the last letter written to him by Catherine of Aragon: "And lastly I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things." But the most authentic thing about it is terror and empathy, and a dark sense of fun. Though it would seem to match her Tudor subjects effortlessly, this is more to do with Mantel's own imagination. She grew up a Catholic in a village in Derbyshire, in a ménage a trios and a house inhabited by ghosts (she wasn't the only one to think it was). She trained to be a lawyer, then a social worker, then a vicarious French revolutionary - in other words, a novelist. She developed an illness that led her to lose her womb and take drugs that increased her weight, and it dogged her for decades. That became, in a sense, a part of her writing life. When she wrote about her sickness she explained that she was "fascinated by the line between writing and physical survival." "Pain is a present-tense business," she wrote in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Remembering to breathe. Plotting to get your feet to the floor, inching a pillow to a bearable position... Until you are cool, settled and your vital signs good, time snaps and sings like an elastic band. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are, of course, written in the present tense. It's Mantel's main tour de force, to bring the past into the present convincingly. She is, in her non-fiction writing, magnificently funny, too. At one point after surgery, she wonders which saint she might pray to - St Sebastian? St Teresa? But the latter, she reflects, "was pierced suddenly by the fiery lance of God's love, whereas I was pierced by prearrangement, in a hospital just off the M25." One of the most virtuosic scenes in Bring Up the Bodies describes Catherine of Aragon's presumed stomach cancer. When I asked Mantel if her own experience helped her to write it, she was understandably dismissive of the question. Yet one can't help stumbling over her line, in an account of a hospital stay: "I see that it was probably an error to have read the Catherine of Aragon biography." Let's just say that there are things Mantel imagines, and there are things she knows, and the line between them is not for us to draw. Why do we crave histories? When Mantel wrote her first historical novel, in 1979, the genre was so unpopular that it remained unpublished for years. Now her books are being adapted by the RSC, putting her on the same stage as Shakespeare's history plays. To some extent, the form can tell us about the present, and Cromwell has become a man for our times, a Machiavellian seer in a world of crisis. The day after she won the Man Booker Prize, Mantel told me we could do with Cromwell coming back to sort out the banking system and revive the welfare state. But she is also cautious. "I'm not just writing a giant parable of today," she said. We have to respect those people's stories in their own right. They are no less people for being dead. Now we have to hope she can break free enough from her shrine to complete the trilogy. The last words of her latest book suggest she will. "There are no endings," she writes. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.