Why Prince George may never become King
It’s not often that the creme de la creme of the literary world intersect with all things royal; after all, the house of Windsor is a famously and proudly anti-intellectual bunch.
This is not a group of people reading Goethe in the original high German or who have thoughts on Keynesian economic theory. (Prince Charles was the first senior member of the royal family to ever go to university and he somehow managed to get into ultra-prestigious Cambridge University despite only having gotten a B in History and a C in French in his final exams.)
But in 2013, Booker Prize-winning novelist Dame Hilary Mantel made global headlines after deciding to share her caustic take on Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge during a lecture at the British Museum. Her assessment? A searing excoriation of the women who would be Queen, calling her a “plastic princess” who was “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”, and that “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”