HILARY MANTEL Wolf Hall ***

This book could have been so good, but Hilary Mantel seems determined to make it hard work for the reader.

It's a novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's Chief Minister - how he rose from a working-class background to become sidekick to Wolsey and then to the King himself. The book ends when Ann Boleyn is made Queen.

There's lots of fascinating detail and insight into the life of the court, and Hilary Mantel draws a convincing portrait of a man who keeps his eyes and ears open and doesn't say too much.

But it's a long haul (over 650 pages) and - my chief gripe - she keeps referring to Cromwell as 'He'. So you get a couple of sentences on the lines of "Thomas More entered the room. He looked at him." Is More looking at Cromwell or vice versa? You don't know till the end of the paragraph when you find you guessed wrong and have to go back and read it again to make sense of things. WHY did she do it?