Latest news with #WolfHall
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk 'Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it
A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait. 'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.' 'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.' Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.' By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.' 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall). 'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.' 'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.' Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.' Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.' So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground. 'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.' Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch. 'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.' Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap. 'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.' Get the Envelope newsletter, sent three times a week during awards season, for exclusive reporting, insights and commentary. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Commentary: In his quest for cultural dominance, Trump threatens what makes America great
Before members of Congress vote on the budget package that President Trump is about to send them, they might consider watching the adaptation of Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light," which recently concluded on PBS' Masterpiece. In the final episodes, Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), pissed (per usual) that things are not going his way, orders the execution of his right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance). Henry will come to regret it, of course, but he is an impetuous and paranoid narcissist, with little sense of history and even less vision. Cromwell's journey to Tower Hill is, in its way, poetic justice. After all, he helped Henry grow the powers of the monarchy, making him head of the Church of England as well as the kingdom, and did not object to using the chopping block to do it. Now PBS, famous for reminding us, through documentaries and series like "Wolf Hall," of the historic pitfalls of power, is facing the axe. Trump has ordered that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies stop public financing for PBS and NPR. Trump has put many things on his chopping block of late, including our system of checks and balances, civil rights, the economy and far too many cultural touchstones. Like Henry VIII and many emperors, he wants not just political power but cultural dominance. Read more: Trump fires Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet Just as the increasingly Rococo White House reflects Trump's Versailles-knockoff style, his ghastly "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order is a disingenuous and authoritarian mandate to remake not just American history but also our arts and letters, sports and media into an endless reflection of his ideological image. In addition to cutting funds for PBS and NPR, Trump has, via executive order, threatened to defund elite universities, including Harvard, that refuse to take government dictation over curriculum and hiring policies. In his rampage to root out 'wokeness,' he has dismantled Voice of America (the country's largest and oldest international broadcaster), personally taken over programming at the Kennedy Center and obliterated the curatorial autonomy of the Smithsonian (on Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, which he may or may not be legally able to do, claiming that she was too "partisan"). In order to ensure that a single trans athlete was unable to compete unimpeded in a high school track event, he threatened to withhold federal funds from California (which contributes more than 12% of those funds, making it the largest donor state in the country). Under Elon Musk, Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (a name George Orwell could have coined), has defunded, among other things, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institutes of Health and the National Park Service. Trump recently suggested that Alcatraz be turned back to a working prison, which, given his draconian immigration policies, forces one to wonder how soon before he decides to replace the Statue of Liberty's torch with a 'do not enter' sign or destroy Lady Liberty altogether as the Nazis did during their fictional takeover of the U.S. in "The Man in the High Castle"? Many of the institutions that Trump now threatens to curtail or destroy have made this country a democratic haven and cultural center for decades. They have looked on the tempests of war, economic turmoil, civil unrest and seesawing politics and remained, as Shakespeare said, an ever-fixed mark, adapting to atmospheric shifts but essentially unchanged. Read more: PBS sues Trump White House over executive order to cut funding Not surprisingly, some of the proposed cuts are being challenged in court by PBS, NPR, Harvard and other besieged institutions. ABC reported in March that the Trump administration had been sued three times for every business day of his presidency. As many have pointed out, his plan to Make America Great Again involves destroying many of the things that made it great in the first place. Which may explain, in part, his consistently poor showing in popularity polls. To be fair, Trump has never been explicit about the antecedent Again. But over the years, he has pointed to the economic boom at the turn of the 20th century and again in the years following World War II as times when the United States was, by his lights, truly great. Many believe that Trump actually hopes to return to the relatively brief Gilded Age, the years between 1870 and 1890 during which captains of industry/robber barons flourished, aided in large part by the expansion of the railroads (at the hands, it must be noted, of Chinese and Irish immigrants). But the actual turn of the century saw the rise of the Progressive Era during which the robber barons turned to philanthropy, funding medical research, libraries, museums and universities; unions and the women's suffrage movement triumphed; and President Theodore Roosevelt enacted his Square Deal, breaking up trusts, avoiding tariffs, protecting consumers and establishing the national parks. In the early 1900s, journalism, the muckrakers, became highly influential, raising awareness about many social ills, including child labor, unsafe working conditions and unsanitary food processing. Read more: NPR and public radio stations sue Trump White House over funding cuts Likewise, during the economic expansion post-WWII, American politics were dominated by liberal Democrats still operating within the ethos of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, including the GI Bill by which a generation of Americans attended college. At Harvard, where enrollment nearly doubled, almost half of the class of 1949 was WWII veterans. So it's odd, to say the least, that Trump would choose to trumpet these particular eras as the benchmarks to which he hopes our country will return even as he attempts to destroy many of the institutions that have their roots in those times. Voice of America was founded during WWII to counter Axis propaganda and continued to bring cultural and political democracy to countries under authoritarian rule. It was so effective that Putin tried to block it. Trump is now shutting it down and plans to advance the pro-Trump One America News Network. The Smithsonian has engaged with many presidents since its establishment in 1846 (the vice president always serves on the Board of Regents), especially both of the Roosevelts. But no one but Trump ever attempted to strip the museum of its independent curatorial process by dictating what should and should not be featured in its many museums. Read more: Trump, '60 Minutes' and corruption allegations put Paramount on edge with sale less certain PBS, NPR and the Kennedy Center are more recent additions, but their aims and presence grow naturally from the kind of federal funding for arts and media prevalent during the Progressive Era and following WWII, when presidential administrations, of both parties, agreed with the founding fathers' belief that democracy requires an informed electorate and Americans are entitled to free expression. Like the Constitution, our iconic cultural institutions can grow to reflect the country they serve, but also like the Constitution, they cannot be threatened or eviscerated at the whim of the president. As they prepare to receive Trump's budget cuts, some Republican members of Congress have already expressed uneasiness over the proposed gutting of PBS. That queasiness should be taken as the symptom of a larger problem — a president should certainly be able to influence American culture, but he cannot be allowed to dismantle it. As they consider their vote, our elected officials might want to reacquaint themselves with the actual history of American greatness. And then they should have a look at 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.' Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In his quest for cultural dominance, Trump threatens what makes America great
Before members of Congress vote on the budget package that President Trump is about to send them, they might consider watching the adaptation of Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which recently concluded on PBS' Masterpiece. In the final episodes, Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), pissed (per usual) that things are not going his way, orders the execution of his right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance). Henry will come to regret it, of course, but he is an impetuous and paranoid narcissist, with little sense of history and even less vision. Cromwell's journey to Tower Hill is, in its way, poetic justice. After all, he helped Henry grow the powers of the monarchy, making him head of the Church of England as well as the kingdom, and did not object to using the chopping block to do it. Now PBS, famous for reminding us, through documentaries and series like 'Wolf Hall,' of the historic pitfalls of power, is facing the axe. Trump has ordered that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies stop public financing for PBS and NPR. Trump has put many things on his chopping block of late, including our system of checks and balances, civil rights, the economy and far too many cultural touchstones. Like Henry VIII and many emperors, he wants not just political power but cultural dominance. Just as the increasingly Rococo White House reflects Trump's Versailles-knockoff style, his ghastly 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History' executive order is a disingenuous and authoritarian mandate to remake not just American history but also our arts and letters, sports and media into an endless reflection of his ideological image. In addition to cutting funds for PBS and NPR, Trump has, via executive order, threatened to defund elite universities, including Harvard, that refuse to take government dictation over curriculum and hiring policies. In his rampage to root out 'wokeness,' he has dismantled Voice of America (the country's largest and oldest international broadcaster), personally taken over programming at the Kennedy Center and obliterated the curatorial autonomy of the Smithsonian (on Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, which he may or may not be legally able to do, claiming that she was too 'partisan'). In order to ensure that a single trans athlete was unable to compete unimpeded in a high school track event, he threatened to withhold federal funds from California (which contributes more than 12% of those funds, making it the largest donor state in the country). Under Elon Musk, Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (a name George Orwell could have coined), has defunded, among other things, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institutes of Health and the National Park Service. Trump recently suggested that Alcatraz be turned back to a working prison, which, given his draconian immigration policies, forces one to wonder how soon before he decides to replace the Statue of Liberty's torch with a 'do not enter' sign or destroy Lady Liberty altogether as the Nazis did during their fictional takeover of the U.S. in 'The Man in the High Castle'? Many of the institutions that Trump now threatens to curtail or destroy have made this country a democratic haven and cultural center for decades. They have looked on the tempests of war, economic turmoil, civil unrest and seesawing politics and remained, as Shakespeare said, an ever-fixed mark, adapting to atmospheric shifts but essentially unchanged. Not surprisingly, some of the proposed cuts are being challenged in court by PBS, NPR, Harvard and other besieged institutions. ABC reported in March that the Trump administration had been sued three times for every business day of his presidency. As many have pointed out, his plan to Make America Great Again involves destroying many of the things that made it great in the first place. Which may explain, in part, his consistently poor showing in popularity polls. To be fair, Trump has never been explicit about the antecedent Again. But over the years, he has pointed to the economic boom at the turn of the 20th century and again in the years following World War II as times when the United States was, by his lights, truly great. Many believe that Trump actually hopes to return to the relatively brief Gilded Age, the years between 1870 and 1890 during which captains of industry/robber barons flourished, aided in large part by the expansion of the railroads (at the hands, it must be noted, of Chinese and Irish immigrants). But the actual turn of the century saw the rise of the Progressive Era during which the robber barons turned to philanthropy, funding medical research, libraries, museums and universities; unions and the women's suffrage movement triumphed; and President Theodore Roosevelt enacted his Square Deal, breaking up trusts, avoiding tariffs, protecting consumers and establishing the national parks. In the early 1900s, journalism, the muckrakers, became highly influential, raising awareness about many social ills, including child labor, unsafe working conditions and unsanitary food processing. Likewise, during the economic expansion post-WWII, American politics were dominated by liberal Democrats still operating within the ethos of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, including the GI Bill by which a generation of Americans attended college. At Harvard, where enrollment nearly doubled, almost half of the class of 1949 was WWII veterans. So it's odd, to say the least, that Trump would choose to trumpet these particular eras as the benchmarks to which he hopes our country will return even as he attempts to destroy many of the institutions that have their roots in those times. Voice of America was founded during WWII to counter Axis propaganda and continued to bring cultural and political democracy to countries under authoritarian rule. It was so effective that Putin tried to block it. Trump is now shutting it down and plans to advance the pro-Trump One America News Network. The Smithsonian has engaged with many presidents since its establishment in 1846 (the vice president always serves on the Board of Regents), especially both of the Roosevelts. But no one but Trump ever attempted to strip the museum of its independent curatorial process by dictating what should and should not be featured in its many museums. PBS, NPR and the Kennedy Center are more recent additions, but their aims and presence grow naturally from the kind of federal funding for arts and media prevalent during the Progressive Era and following WWII, when presidential administrations, of both parties, agreed with the founding fathers' belief that democracy requires an informed electorate and Americans are entitled to free expression. Like the Constitution, our iconic cultural institutions can grow to reflect the country they serve, but also like the Constitution, they cannot be threatened or eviscerated at the whim of the president. As they prepare to receive Trump's budget cuts, some Republican members of Congress have already expressed uneasiness over the proposed gutting of PBS. That queasiness should be taken as the symptom of a larger problem — a president should certainly be able to influence American culture, but he cannot be allowed to dismantle it. As they consider their vote, our elected officials might want to reacquaint themselves with the actual history of American greatness. And then they should have a look at 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.'
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk ‘Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it
A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait. 'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.' 'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.' Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.' By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.' 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall). 'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.' 'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.' Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.' Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.' So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground. 'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.' Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch. 'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.' Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap. 'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.'
Winnipeg Free Press
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Pre-Tudor prose a royally good romp
Funny, clever and unapologetically filthy, English writer Jo Harkin's second novel explores the life of an obscure but fascinating figure in the 15th-century English royal court. Harkin debuted as a novelist in 2022 with Tell Me An Ending, a work of literary sci-fi. She easily proves her depth as a writer with her switch to historical fiction in The Pretender. Harkin's stark prose and unsentimental view of history will remind readers of fellow English author Hilary Mantel, best-known for her Wolf Hall series, set at the court of King Henry VIII of England. The Pretender Here the main character is Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne of King Henry VII of England (father of Henry VIII). The novel opens on a remote farm in England in 1483, introducing readers to 10-year-old peasant John Collan. When we first meet John, his biggest worry is avoiding the bad-tempered village goat on his way to collect water. This changes when a nobleman arrives one day with astonishing news: John is actually Edward, Earl of Warwick, a member of the ruling House of York, nephew to the current King Richard III, and secret son of Richard's long-dead brother George, Duke of Clarence. As the nobleman tells him, 'You are the earl of Warwick by title… and, after the present king and his progeny, you're next in line to the throne.' Codenamed Lambert Simnel for now, the bewildered child is whisked away and groomed to take his place as heir to the throne when the time arrives. Lambert is informally tutored by Joan, the daughter of one of his mentors, who is gifted with striking political savvy and a definite lack of conscience. When Henry Tudor arrives in England and takes the throne from Richard III, Lambert's mentors plot to overthrow Henry and crown Lambert as the true King of England. But meanwhile, Lambert and Joan plot to take control of their own lives. The best historical fiction not only explores the dynamics of the past, it draws parallels to present times. Harkins does this skilfully. She explores themes of identity, misogyny, freedom and the biases of recorded history. One passage even takes sly aim at the influence of misogynistic podcasters like Joe Rogan and incel culture: 'All the Roman poets hated women… Men who aren't wanted by women say women are shrews or strumpets,' points out Lambert's friend Joan. While we know very little about the real-life Lambert Simnel beyond his role as a threat to Henry VII's rule, Harkins goes beyond this one episode of his life to explore how it may have affected his psyche: 'More than anything, he (Lambert) feels a great hatred for himself. His self? What is that? What part of him is this? Does it come from John Collan, or Lambert, or Edward, or Simnel? Is he any of them, even? Who the f— is he?' Lambert frets. Harkins is gleefully dirty in her writing, dropping references to sex and bodily functions as often as horses drop, well, poop. While this adds humour and makes her writing stand out against dominant historical novelists such as Philippa Gregory and historian-turned-novelist Alison Weir, it does seem gratuitous at times. Kathryne Cardwell is a Winnipeg writer.
