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January 27, 2023
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Ellen Ullman

Ellen Ullman is a former software engineer. She is the author of Close to the Machine, a memoir and The Bug, a novel.

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

2nd Look

The Story of a Stare Down

by Penelope Rowlands

Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s most revered novelists, died last year at the age of 70. She is beloved for her sweeping Wolf Hall trilogy, for which she won two Booker Prizes. But long before rehabilitating Thomas Cromwell’s reputation, Mantel was unparalleled in her crystalline dissections of power, whether between girls at the University of London or Dantonists in the French Revolution. In honor of Mantel’s enormous contributions to literature, dive back into her Tudor world with Penelope Rowlands’s essay about one of the key power dynamics Mantel explored: that between Cromwell and Sir Thomas More.

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