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Paper Monitor

11:38 UK time, Wednesday, 20 February 2013

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

It's Horrible Hilary today. And bumpy Kate.

"Lay off Princess Kate" . "Cameron fury after pregnant Duchess attacked as 'plastic'".

The Sun has a double page spread. .

It's the story of double Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel's "sneering" attack on Kate Middleton. And of Kate's baby bump being revealed.

Paper Monitor suspects it's the first time a lecture for the London Review of Books ended up splashed across the tabloids. Experts are drafted in to stick up for Horrible Hilary before their arguments are royally disembowelled.

"She was actually trying to defend Kate - saying we should not look at Royal consorts like animals in the zoo," royal historian Kate Williams tells The Sun.

Oh no she wasn't, says Sun columnist Louise Mensch.

"Shrieking lefties said we misunderstood the best-selling novelist." But Mensch says she's read the whole LRB piece and is not impressed. "We really don't need such sexist, sneering nonsense from a novelist - Booker prize or no."

Mensch then applies the coup de grace. While Kate is never allowed an angry word, an extra glass of wine, a hair out of place, Mantel can spend all day in her pyjamas.

The Daily Mail takes a similar adversarial approach. "A bitter salvo against a textbook royal who's done no harm to anyone," thunders AN Wilson.

Julie Burchill is wheeled in like some ageing but . "Sorry, Kate is just Diana Lite - a simpering and prissy princess."

The Daily Telegraph plays these things with a predictably straight bat. Historian Alison Weir's feature is fitted out with the anything but ambiguous headline "The perfect royal consort".

Matt's cartoon is more entertaining. A couple of drinkers are pictured in the pub studying a newspaper with the headline "Mantel Row". One says to the other: "Unfortunately, I had a fiver on Kate's baby being called Hilary".

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