@KimikosNightmare
It's written in third person limited present tense (google it)
I hate anything in the present tense. David Mitchell uses it occasionally and that's fine as he's such a good writer- but everyone else- stop it.
I haven't read Wolf Hall but I hated 8 and a half months on Gaza Street and Beyond Black
(Also I'm not a royal family fan but that comment about Kate was so spiteful)
Back on topic- any novel by D H Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway.
You mean Hilary Mantel's essay Royal Bodies?
Have you read the essay? It's not at all spiteful, it's compassionate, if anything, and it's talking about KM as constructed by public discourses obsessed with her appearance, as they were with Marie Antoinette's, and her capacity to breed and continue the royal bloodline, like Anne Boleyn:
Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation. When her pregnancy became public she had been visiting her old school, and had picked up a hockey stick and run a few paces for the camera. BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken. And in the same way one is compelled to look at them: to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.
I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.
The whole essay is worth a read -- she certainly doesn't spare herself as a royal watcher, either, or suggest she's not as guilty of curiosity as anyone else.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies
(I love Beyond Black, but if you'd said her depicting of Princess Diana's ghost in that is incredibly cruel, I'd agree with you. Brilliant, but vicious.)