Hilary Mantel in Conversation

Thomas Cromwell is one of the most beguiling characters in British history. Born into poverty on the backstreets of Putney, this son of a blacksmith navigated the complex choreographies of the Tudor court and became Henry VIII's right hand-man. He is often seen as a ruthless and narcissistic; as one commentator put it "there was no shortage of bastards in the early 16th century, but Thomas Cromwell stands out as one of the biggest bastards of them all."

Enter Hilary Mantel, whose outstanding trilogy of historical fiction cunningly reimagines Cromwell's character. In Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies (which both won a booker) and the forthcoming The Mirror Of The Light, Mantel takes accepted historical facts, and casts them in a different light.

Her Cromwell is storybook villain no longer: Mantel's richly psychological portrait is of a sensitive, brilliant, conflicted man. The author has an academic's precision and a novelist's ingenuity; the result is an irresistible new historical perspective, which brings a terror and immediacy back to the events we know so well.

On 3 December, Mantel will discuss Thomas Cromwell with Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. Book now, as two of our most outstanding historical minds will together summon one of history's most elusive character's to the present day and into the light.