Hilary Mantel is not a terrorist: Debunking the ludicrous right-wing backlash to her short story — salon.com

Lest Americans think we have cornered the market on boneheaded, reductive and entirely symbolic political arguments, the British are currently discussing whether Hilary Mantel — the two-time Booker Prize-winning author of “Wolf Hall” — ought to be investigated for fantasizing about killing a dead woman. At issue is a short story titled “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher — August 6, 1983,” describing the events leading up to the moment a sniper picked off Thatcher as she walked out of a private hospital. The shooting never happened, of course, but Mantel really did see the prime minister from her own bedroom window on that day and reports thinking, “if I wasn’t me, if I was someone else, she’d be dead.” Like many Britons, Mantel vividly recalls how she felt about Thatcher and her policy of completely deregulated capitalism. “I can still feel that boiling detestation,” she told the Guardian. “She did long-standing damage in many areas of national life.”

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