Mantel attacks 'plastic' princess

One of Britain's most celebrated authors has launched a withering attack on the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, branding her a "shop-window mannequin" with a plastic smile whose only role in life is to breed.
In an unusually scathing public attack on a royal, Hilary Mantel said the princess had no personality, a "perfect plastic smile" and appears to have been designed by a committee.
"I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung," Mantel said in a lecture at the British Museum earlier this month in which she spoke about her changing views about the princess.
"She 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."
Mantel, who last year became the first Briton to twice win the coveted Man Booker prize for fiction, referred to the princess's severe morning sickness during the early stage of her pregnancy and said her role was to provide an heir.
In her lecture on February 4, Mantel said the Duchess of Cambridge was "selected for her role ... because she was irreproachable", contrasting her with the "emotional incontinence" of William's late mother, Princess Diana.
"As painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana," Mantel said.