The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odor of family quarrels brewing. So great a hold did it have over me that I began quite obsessively to seek out every book I could lay hands on that dealt either with the Revolution itself or with the principal players. He understood very well that it was his mother, the hatchet-nosed corpse with its terrifying paper hands.

Once again, Mantel takes a lot for granted in her readers and assumes we understand the context and origins of the politics of the Revolution - she name-checks Tacitus and Rousseau but doesn't explore their influence in any great detail. There were two dogs running after him with their tails between their legs; trailing behind came Anne-Madeleine, bawling with rage and despair. Before that, we're treated to long scenes during the childhood, adolescence and early careers of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins - a bit like that opener in Wolf Hall where we see Cromwell as a young battered boy, only in the latter book Mantel then moves swiftly to the substance of her protagonist's life. My first book was pure wish fulfilment, about a girl who became a dancer, and with the recent publication of a ballet trilogy – Born to Dance, Star Quality and Showtime – I seem to have come full circle.

He was taken up by Stanislas Fréron, who was five years older, who was named after his godfather, the King of Poland. He thought that the only purpose of the project was to excuse his father from conversing with his mother in the evenings. Many are put off by the size of this book, however if you think of it as 3 normal sized novels about three people who knew each other as friends, -- which are all woven together into one, you will see it's not long at all.

Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost , and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. Danton is Minister of Justice at the time, and Desmoulins is his secretary, so they bear some responsibility for the massacres as well. But to be fair: nearly everyone we encounter earlier in the book ends up under the guillotine and the whole revolution feels like a train wreck at the end of the book.The priests said he came with it, and Jean-Nicolas said he assuredly did not leave home with it; and it was concluded that Camille's fluency of speech lay discarded along the coach route, like a valise or a pair of gloves that has gone astray. Mantel does not take her narrative up to Robespierre’s downfall and death, which occurred a few months later, but, of course, readers with knowledge of the French Revolution will know it will happen, and Mantel foreshadows it.

The present tense passages might be meant to give more of a sense of immediacy, even though I see that in some of the past tense passages as well. She is a staunch supporter of the monarchy and a devout Catholic, after Danton has become an atheist and abandoned his early belief that France should have a king.At first they kept up the fiction that he was engaged in a lengthy and prestigious case in another city. An ambitious, gripping epic and a tour de force of historical fiction, A Place of Greater Safety tells the story of three young men who find themselves in Paris in 1789, at the dawn of the French Revolution. Mantel considers Marat, one of the most bloodthirsty of the Jacobin leaders, the primary figure responsible for the massacres.