Hilary Mantel, Kate Middleton, and Royal Bodies today

Mantel won the fiction prize in 2009 with 'Wolf Hall' (Getty Images)

So presumably you've seen the fuss that's kicked off this morning about the double Booker Prize winner and the Duchess of Cambridge. This morning Sarah Sands, the Editor of the Evening Standard, tweeted: "London Review of Books is like parliamentary privilege for authors. It is also where Alan Bennett is fearlessly newsworthy".

In a moment on the Drip we'll have the best of the Twitter reaction. Here, for the time being, are some of the choice quotes from Mantel's lecture. Quite cutting, don't you think?

"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."

"What does Kate read? It’s a question."

"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."

"[She looks like] a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.”

"Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary."