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I do enjoy Hilary Mantel's ferocious wit. I liked "Fludd" very much indeed, particularly because I read her memoir a while ago and could recognise her descriptions of life in a village in the bleak north of England in the 1950s. I loved the way she brought some of her experiences of growing up a Catholic there to give a feeling of authenticity to some very mysterious events when Fludd arrives and changes people's lives.

She has some laugh out loud moments and I particularly enjoyed her description of the Catholic church:

"The Church was in fact less than a hundred years old; it had been built when the Irish came to Fetherhoughton to work in the three cotton mills. But someone had briefed its architect to make it look as if it had always stood there. In those poor, troubled days it was an understandable wish, and the architect had a sense of history; it was a Shakespearian sense of history, with a grand contempt of the pitfalls of anachronism. Last Wednesday and the Battle of Bosworth are all one; the past is the past, and Mrs O'Toole, buried last Wednesday, is neck and neck with King Richard in the hurtle to eternity. This was - it must have been - the architect's view. From the Romans to the Hanoverians, it was all the same to him; they wore, no doubt, leather jerkins and iron crowns; they burned witches; their buildings were stone and quaint and cold, their windows were not as our windows; they slapped their thighs and said prithee. Only such a vision could have commanded into being the music-hall medievalism of St Thomas Aquinas."

A subversive delight.