Mantel has done her research, explored deep into the sources, as we know she always does. What the historical novel gives us beyond those facts is imaginative proximity. The historian cannot attribute motivation but the novelist must go deep into the head, find desire, faith, love and hatred – and in the characters of the French Revolution she does, to brilliant effect. Danton most of all is made real, a man of fear and hope, desire and equivocation. And she brings to life the ordinary people whom Marie Antoinette sees on her way to the scaffold, the glass-workers who down tools and stream out for revolution.

I had heard that the Royal Shakespeare Company was going to dramatise Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and so when, a few months down the line, I got a call asking if I’d like to play Thomas Cromwell I was excited and slightly daunted. That was the beginning of my journey with Cromwell, and also with Hilary Mantel, who I first met in the RSC rehearsal rooms. Having just read her books it really hit home what an incredible piece of work they are. A Place of Greater Safety is a 1992 novel by Hilary Mantel. It concerns the events of the French Revolution, focusing on the lives of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre from their childhood through the execution of the Dantonists, and also featuring hundreds of other historical figures. Antoine Saint-Just: A young radical ex-poet, formerly emprisionné. A partisan of Robespierre's with significant ambitions of his own. Probably related to Camille, somehow.

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This may be how it was for Madame Guillotine, or it may be the author's detailing, but this happens over and over again. A Place of Greater Safety is a 1992 historical novel by Hilary Mantel, about the French Revolution of 1789. It was the first novel she wrote, but her third to be published. It chronicles the Revolution through the dynamic relationships between three of its central players: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. The novel is basically structured as a dramatized triple biography, covering almost the entirety of their intertwined lives from their respective formative years in the 1760s and 1770s all the way to the executions of the former two at the height of the Reign of Terror. The writing is so very good. Very Hilary Mantel. It is worth bearing in mind that this was her first - that's right - first novel and was written when she was 22 years old! In the interview that she does at the end of the Kindle version, she tells the interviewer that it nearly killed her; that she put it onto a shelf for decades before it was resurrected by new circumstances in her writing career. While the afterlife is mundane, the real world is re-cast as anarchic purgatory, with night closing in on its “perjured ministers and burnt out paedophiles …” Alison is also haunted by apparitions far more sinister than cardigan-hunting grannies, including her lecherous spirit guide Morris. Dark hints intrude, suggestions of a childhood in which he played some despicable part: a mother who prostituted her own under-aged daughter; feral dogs with a taste for human flesh; a disembodied head floating in the bath. This feels agonisingly literal, but we sense that Mantel intends these vulgar, rampaging demons to stand in also for dislodged fragments of memory, the novel reaching for metaphor to make its point, which is of course about the everyday world, not the spiritual one. We might, it suggests, be just as likely to find hell growing up in a rundown house in Aldershot as anywhere else. Marvellous...It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Hilary Mantel captures it all.’ Time Out

A gripping tale based on historical events, extremely well read, each character having his own voice. An extraordinary and overwhelming novel...immensely detailed and yet fast-moving...she has set herself to capture the excitement and intellectual fervour of the period. She does it admirably...a tour de force.’ Scotsman Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles: An young reformist aristocrat and legal dignitary, filthy rich and idle. Later called a "Dantonist". A gambler.If you've learned about the French Revolution at school, you've probably assembled a jumble of facts about the dramatic actions of the revolutionaries and the mob and the outcome of it all. Hilary Mantel dives beneath that to breathe life into the characters who populated the events. Lucile Desmoulins, wife of Camille Desmoulins - a clever and observant woman, much underrated initially, as Desmoulins' first love was her mother and he only married Lucile because Annette/Anne would not consider divorcing her husband. Lucile was in the midst of the group - Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, Marat and the many other men who drove the French Revolution with their commitment and foresight.