Here is the Guardian's editorial. Warning. A few long words....
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There is a generous explanation of yesterday?s sudden furore about what Hilary Mantel said about the Duchess of Cambridge ? a brief medialand frenzy into which both David Cameron and Ed Miliband foolishly allowed themselves to be drawn ? and then there is the one that is probably true.
The generous explanation is that this is half-term. The rich and powerful are on trade missions to India and ski breaks in the Alps. It is therefore a bit of a slow news week, with the press scraping around for things to write about. In such circumstances, there is a gut logic in tapping into the media?s monarchy mother lode, and fanning a controversy about what one of our leading writers has said about one of the most newsworthy royals ? even though it was actually said two weeks before it erupted on to the front pages yesterday.
The true explanation is that Ms Mantel?s supposed attack on the duchess is no such thing. If you trouble to read the richly textured lecture it soon becomes clear that, far from being ?completely misguided? (Cameron) or ?pretty offensive? (Miliband), it is a thoughtful and sympathetic reflection about the duchess and about royal women down the ages. To describe it as either ?venomous? (Daily Mail) or ?outrageous? (Daily Telegraph) is simply silly.
Ms Mantel?s subject is the way that the public relates to royalty, and to royal women in particular. She begins with Marie Antoinette and spends most of her lecture talking about Anne Boleyn and the other women whom she has brought back to life in her two widely read novels about the Tudors. In between she looks at Diana, Princess of Wales, and at her daughter-in-law. Today, as in the past, she argues, royal bodies, especially female ones, are in some sense public property, a claim that only someone who has not opened a newspaper in the past 30 years could dispute. There are, as one would expect from a double Man Booker prize winner, some strikingly expressed ideas, some of which (though not ?a royal lady is a royal vagina?) have been recycled to give the impression that the tone of the lecture is hostile to the duchess. This is manifestly untrue.
In fact, and in a manner which will delight semioticians, the response to Ms Mantel?s lecture embodies the very point that she is making. The royal body, she says, exists to be looked at. People stare at royal women, interpret them, derive entertainment from them, create fantasies about them. Sometimes, as Ms Mantel says, curiosity can become cruelty, even a form of sacrifice, certainly in Diana?s case, perhaps in that of the duchess. It is sad, as the lecture says, that the royals create such an uncontainable compulsion to comment. But in the light of yesterday?s brouhaha it can hardly be denied that they do."