Impressive undoubtedly and full of sly wit - but I wanted something deeply engrossing to fall into while on holiday in France and this kept my brain switched on, my emotions largely off. The girls will be all right, they can do needlework, perhaps people will marry them for their personal charms. Door zich toe te leggen op die dode taal verborg Camille zijn ellende, verwarring en verdriet voor zichzelf; door de ontvanger tot vertalen te dwingen zei hij: Bedenk dat mijn leven wat mij betreft één groot literair spel is, iets wat alleen bestaat wanneer het wordt neergeschreven en per post verstuurd. We have countless women who for the most part just wait while the men execute their opportunistic and not overtly well thought out plans.

If you stand in the Place des Armes and look up at the narrow white facade, you can often see him lurking behind the shutters on the first floor. This is a magnificent achievement, gripping and engrossing, and a strident demonstration of how historical fiction can compliment the academic. The book begins with him as a three-year-old child and ends with his death, along with Danton’s, in April 1794.It was not that he was unwilling to assume responsibilities; he was simply overwhelmed by the perplexities of life,paralyzed by the certainty that there was nothing constructive to be done in any given situation. From the very beginning, Danton has a strong desire for money, unlike Desmoulins, who is content to be a struggling young lawyer until the events of the Revolution overtake him. Mantel’s novel is about three leading figures of the French Revolution: Camille Desmoulins, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre. He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern and not the threads.

I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it’s about the French Revolution, it’s not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances [. I wouldn’t have found A Place of Greater Safety so approachable if Mantel had written thirty-odd to sixty-odd pages of continuous dense prose. Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies , which both won the Booker Prize.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.

He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, "You prick. It would be easy to fall back on using bland stereotypes with such a large cast of characters in the hope this wouldn’t be noticed.Panic-stricken, his mother had taken his head in her hands and shoved the flesh together and hoped against hope it would stick. I found it difficult that sometimes they were referred to as their christian names and then others as their surnames but when you get to around page 300 you have learnt that Desmoulins is also Camille, Robespierre is also Max and Georges/Georges-Jaques is also Danton.