Hilary Mantel on Duchess of Cambridge's 'perfect plastic smile'

Earlier this month, the Man Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel gave the London Review of Books Lecture at the British Museum on the subject of Royal women.

Her lecture was called Undressing Anne Boleyn, and it included observations on the Duchess of Cambridge, some of which were picked up by newspapers on Tuesday and described by the Daily Mail as a "venomous attack".

The speech came several years after an interview in which Mantel was asked which famous person she'd like to donate a book to. She chose Catherine and the book "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution".

In an extract from the speech played on the Today programme, she said: "Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with the perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday 19 February 2013.