Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this year's series of LRB lectures held at the

Bush Museum. As you know, there are always three of these lectures, and they're a very important

annual feature in our calendar, appearing like a comet in our sky.

And as always with comets, or at least the better class of comet, huge crowds gather.

And I'm very pleased indeed that so many of you here this evening for this year's first LRB lecture.

It's a chance for me to say thank you to the London Review of Books and to Mary Kay Wilmers for having established this pattern,

which allows us to think about aspects of what the museum does

in a completely different way.

And a chance of thanking Hilary Mantel

for coming this evening to talk about the Tudor Court.

As you all know, the characters in Wolf Hall and in Bring Up the Bodies

are characters that we feel we've known all our lives. We know how every one of

them died, usually in the same way, and we know something of how they lived. But if we know them

largely through Holbein, we know them one by one as individual portraits by the greatest portraitist.

We know them, if you like, is a series of soliloquies.

What Hillary Mantel has done is turn these soliloquies into a conversation, into a real set of dialogues, a world of conversation,

a party where all these people not just interact with each other, but observe each other at court.

And as we know from Holbein above all, that court was a dangerous place without a friend. And even with a friend

in this marvellous portrait of the ambassadors, it's a world freighted with high learning,

high doctrine and high politics. And Holbein shows us how at this court

it's very hard to see everything,

even the most important details,

...