Endnotes June 2024 & Book Group Directory

Find your next slow read • Reflections on the Wolf Hall Weekend

Dear slow readers

Welcome to a new monthly bulletin from Footnotes and Tangents, the home of slow reading of historical novels. Endnotes will include news from me and an updated list of book groups, readalongs and slow reads taking place on Substack. I hope this Book Group Directory will be a useful resource for you to find your next slow read.

All this year, we have been reading War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. There will be new books in 2025, alongside revised and updated versions of our current readalongs for those who missed out this year. I’ll give more details in future posts, but one book is definitely on our agenda for 2025: Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.

This newsletter is best read online here.

Charlie Courtenay, Earl of Devon (left) with historian Diarmaid Macculloch (right) at the Wolf Hall Weekend. Photo credit: David Holland

Wolf Hall Weekend

Here I am, last Sunday, leading a panel on the Exeter Conspiracy in The Mirror and the Light. The Earl of Devon, festooned in a cape emblazoned with the shield of his ancestors, is showing us a lock of Gertrude Courtenay’s hair. In the 1530s, Gertrude narrowly escaped the headman’s axe. Her husband, Marquess of Exeter, was not so fortunate. Neither was Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, who went to the block in 1541, aged 67. One of her descendants, also called Margaret Pole, was with us in the audience on Sunday.

The Wolf Hall Weekend was a celebration of Hilary Mantel’s writing. David Holland conceived the idea shortly after Hilary’s death in September 2022. It took place on 22 and 23 June at Cadhay House, East Devon, a Tudor manor house beloved by Hilary and a short drive from her home in Budleigh Salterton.

The gardens at Cadhay House

This was a very special weekend, full of warmth and humour, insight and creativity – and a few tears. I was struck by its diversity, bringing together historians, writers, artists, actors and photographers in a rich exchange of ideas and experience. This was a testament to Hilary’s generosity as a person and power as a writer to move and inspire us all. There’s a full list of the weekend’s speakers here.

Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch set the tone in his opening talk on ‘Revisiting the Thomas Cromwell of history.’ When Diarmaid picked up Wolf Hall, he was astounded to discover the same Thomas Cromwell he had found in the archive. He got in touch with Hilary to tell her as much, the start of a special relationship between writer and historian. I strongly recommend his biography of Cromwell as a veritable fourth book in Mantel’s trilogy.

Other historians joining us included Dr Lauren MacKay, Dr Elizabeth Norton and Dr Owen Emmerson. Owen spoke about the incredible discovery of Cromwell’s Book of Hours, the same book that appears in the Holbein portrait.

Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger. Source.

Thomas Cromwell himself took the stage in the form of Ben Miles, the definitive narrator of the audiobooks who performed Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptations of the trilogy. Ben memorably told Hilary that reading Wolf Hall helped him understand what it means to be English. He and fellow actor Aurora Dawson Hunte gave us a tantalisingly short performance from the stage version of The Mirror and the Light. Aurora presented her own talk on ‘Ghosts, spirits and muses’, a subject very dear to my heart as readers of The Haunting of Wolf Hall will know.

The gardens at Cadhay House

Ben was joined by his brother and photographer George Miles to talk about The Wolf Hall Picture Book. This is a rather extraordinary project that pairs quotes from Hilary Mantel with photos of contemporary London. It reminds us of how the past haunts the present if only we learn new (and old) ways of seeing and how to look around corners. This was Hilary’s extraordinary gift, according to her literary agent, Bill Hamilton. He and editor Nicholas Pearson joined David Holland in conversation about working with Hilary and about her brilliant Reith Lectures on historical fiction.

Over the weekend, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting some half dozen of you guys, including

Tracey Nicholls

, who insisted on capturing a sheepish Simon Haisell on camera. Thanks Tracey!

It was an utter delight to put faces to usernames. The online world can seem so strange and disconnected, so it is beautiful to get a sense of all the people brought together and into conversation in this community. At some point in the future, I’d love to plan a Wolf Crawl Meetup in London. And if there is anything I can do to help readers in other countries connect, do let me know.

I also finally got to meet

Bea Stitches

! Dr. Lucie Bea Dutton has been stitching the Cromwell books for almost a decade now. We met over on Instagram, and she now has her own newsletter on Substack. Bea is wonderful and kind and a goldmine of knowledge about the books. She is also an inspiration. Her work embodies what I call creative reading: the idea that the book is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning, for each reader brings their whole being to the book and, in reading, makes something entirely new.

Lucie Bea Dutton’s Cromwell stitching project was on display throughout the weekend.

Or, as Hilary said after the publication of The Mirror and the Light:

A book isn’t complete until it is read. And there are as many interpretations as there are readers.

This weekend and this year of slow reading are also beginnings. A book is never just a book, and I know without a doubt that these encounters across the page will change lives and create new worlds. I am as ever impatient to know what happens next.

There are no endings. If you think so you are decieved as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.¹

The weekend stirred up all kinds of memories for me. It reminded me that a few days after Hilary died, I wrote a short piece of writing about how her words made me feel. It is languishing in an Instagram caption, and I thought I should give it some love and rehouse it here on my website. I have also recorded it for those who prefer to listen to these things:

The Unmaking

In memory of Hilary Mantel (1952 – 2022)

These books are dangerous. Because they are alive.

And life is not safe.

If it were, we would not be born, but come dreamed into essence. Sprites in the mist, dancing at dawn, without memories or care.

There would be no last battle in the bedchamber. Blood in the bowl. Lights flashing on the night ward. Cold feet in an empty house.

For good or for ill, some old giant found our thoughts, wandering in a green glade wood. Gathered up in a sack, he hauled us back, to a cave before time, with a fire at its lip.

Here in twilight, firelight and drum, he poured our thoughts slowly in. To bones and flesh, bound in skin. A body new, but already frayed. Broken in the breaking in.

It was the giant that told us stories. And how to speak to the dead. At the back of his cave, water fell beyond black. And ghosts sat playing dice. Painting monsters on the wall.

By morning we were fully made. With breath and pulse, eyes and elbows. Nightmares, dreams. We said farewell.

But a body made, can be unmade. And the ghosts came with us. The monsters too. Those teeth, those claws, flashing in candlelight, slipping from the rock.

So we're lost in the woods and we're moving fast. We've stories to tell, but no time to tell them. Ghosts to outrun, but the day's running on.

We come to a river. And open sky.

Above, birds scatter and strange silhouettes. Gods, giant moths — men with arms raised & feathered, flying to the sun. Climbing ladders to heaven.

We want to get up and follow them there, but our hearts ache from trying. Our feet: lead in our boots.

So into the water we wade. It's not deep, it's not fast. Fish graze our ankles, a heron watches us cross. There's music and laughter somewhere beyond. Voices remembered from long ago.

We'll make it, we say, a place of safety awaits. Though the river grows dark and the heron flies away.

The water is rising, tears from the mountain. Fast now and swallowing whole trees in its flow.

Midway you wonder, what will become of your memories. Your stories? Your ghosts?

For the past is fiction, the future is myth.

And now's the unmaking. The silence of words.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Source

Book Group Directory

Footnotes and Tangents is part of a growing ecosystem of book groups, readalongs and slow reads on Substack. This directory lists active newsletters and what groups are reading so everyone can find their next slow read.

If you host a book group on Substack and would like to be included, send me an email or direct message. An online version of this list will be updated here.

The Big Read

Host:

Jeremy Anderberg

• Last: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë • Current: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Close Reads HQ

Hosts:

David Kern

Tim McIntosh

Heidi White

• Now: Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset & To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Closely Reading

Host:

haley larsen, phd

• Now: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Everything is Amazing

Host:

Mike Sowden

• Now: On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz

Footnotes and Tangents

Host:

Simon Haisell

• Last: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel • Now: Bring Up the Bodies & War and Peace • Next: The Mirror and the Light (start 22 July)

Notes from the Town Hermit

Host:

Tiffany Chu

• Next: Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (September)

Paper Knife

Host:

Leonard Gaya

• Now: A Year of Reading Kafka

Personal Canon Formation

Host:

John Halbrooks

• Last: Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien • Now: Emma by Jane Austen • Next: Jonathan Swift & Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Recovering Academic

Host:

Joshua Doležal

• Last: My Ántonia by Willa Cather

Virginia Woolf Reading Group

Host:

Tash

• Last: Mrs Dalloway • Next: To the Lighthouse (next year)

That’s all from me. As always, if you have any questions about Footnotes and Tangents and the book groups, just reply to this email, send a direct message on the app, or leave a question in the comments.

Photo by Eli Francis on Unsplash

I wish everyone a wonderful July, and I’ll meet many of you soon between the pages of our current slow reads.

Simon

1. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies.