Binge-reading and -watching

Binge-watchers filling up empty days may ask: Why read a book when there's the movie? Apart from putting the cart before the horse, it's a lazy question

Days before the lockdown and disruption of book supplies I was fortunate to have a couple of excellent deliveries: The third of Hilary Mantel’s hugely successful award-winning trilogy The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate; Rs 799) which is a wrist-wrenching 830-page tome; and Alexander Norman’s splendid new biography The Dalai Lama: An Extraordinary Life (HarperCollins; Rs  799). 

From different epochs both are accounts of two larger-than-life leaders navigating the treacherous terrain of religion and politics. Yet what could Henry VIII and His Holiness possibly have in common — the one a willful, machinating, cruel monarch severing ties with the Church