Author Hilary Mantel faces speech backlash as Kate Middleton shows off her royal baby bump
BRITAIN'S media is in a spin after criticism of their darling, the Duchess of Cambridge - as a bunch of notorious web jokers get in on the act.
BRITAIN'S media is in a spin after criticism of their darling, the Duchess of Cambridge, by a famed author.
Hilary Mantel, who won two Man Booker Prizes for her fictionalised retelling of life in Henry VIII's court, is now experiencing her own clash with the ambitions and eccentricities of those who consider themselves part of the royal court.
And adding to the controversy, a notorious group of web jokers have got in on the act.
Mantel's speech, in which she calls Kate Middleton a "shop window mannequin" with a "plastic smile" whose only purpose is to breed, has now been given the Taiwanese animation treatment, with a new video released by NMAtv.
Meanwhile, not only are predictable titles such as The Sun and The Daily Mail up in arms about the apparent criticism, even more staid and respectable names such as The Telegraph and The Independent have waded into the furore.
"A bizarre rant", The Sun screams. "Astonishing and venemous" The Daily Mail declares.
The Telegraph jumped on Prime Minister David Cameron's response in which he labels Mantel as"completely misguided and completely wrong". Joe Little, the editor of Majesty Magazine, was quoted as saying that Mantel's comments were "incredibly unkind."
But The Independenthas bucked the trend by coming out in defence of the author, stating that anyone who actually listens to her speech would never leap to the same conclusions. It was a venom-free cry from the heart about the impact of media attention on celebrities, it ruled.
The double Booker Brize winning author, 60, faces the criticism for declaring the duchess had neither the personality of William's mother Diana nor the presence of historical heavyweight Anne Boleyn.
Britain's media has focused on a few lines from the lecture given two weeks ago at the British Museum and reprinted this week in the London Review of Books literary journal, in which Mantel said the Duchess of Cambridge appeared "machine-made" when she first emerged in public.
"Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished," Mantel said.
Mantel said 31-year-old Catherine had gone from being a "jointed doll on which certain rags are hung" to someone whose "only point and purpose" was to have children, according to the novelist.
Before marrying second-in-line to the throne William in 2011 and falling pregnant last year, Kate was a "shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore."
"These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant," she said.
The novelist compared Kate unfavourably to Boleyn, the "power player" who married 16th-century English king Henry VIII before he had her beheaded, and to Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997.
"She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture."
A spokeswoman for William and Catherine declined to comment when contacted.
In many ways, Mantel had the final say in the very speech that caused such an uproar: "We don't cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn't have to repeat itself... I'm not asking for censorship. I'm not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I'm asking us to back off and not be brutes."
Mantel is the only woman to win the Man Booker Price twice, claiming the first in 2009 for Wolf Hall, the opening part of her trilogy about Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell.
The second installment, Bring Up The Bodies, won the award last year.
Meanwhile, the Duchess of Cambridge has shown off her baby bump for the first time as she did charity work at a women's addiction centre.
It follows the publication of unauthorised pictures of the duchess in a bikini, showing her bump, which is said to have angered the royal family.
This time though Catherine was elegantly dressed in a grey wrap, above-the-knee dress by Max Mara Studio, complete with a ruched waist and attached waist tie.
Hope House, in the southwest suburb of Clapham, was one of the first charities that the duchess became a patron of. It is designed as a safe place for women to recover from substance dependence and receive additional support for other compulsive disorders.
