But the account of that incident begins quite clearly on All Hallows’ Day. Rather, it begins the evening before, on All Hallows’ Eve. It seems I’m the only writer who has ever noticed that it’s the day of the dead. This is a man who, in the last three years, has lost his wife and two daughters. He’s now lost his patron and his career is about to be destroyed. Once you realize what day it is, everything changes. A man may cry for more than one thing at once, and when you ask him why, he may not tell you. This appears to me to be the kind of thing that a novelist notices and that historians manage to ­ignore, generation after generation. Their minds don’t make the jump because to them it’s just another dateline—it could be May the twenty-fifth. That strikes me as a really powerful example of how evidence is lying all around us and we just don’t see it. When Raymond Carver wrote a story about Chekhov’s death, he invented details and a character. Janet Malcolm traced how subsequent biographies now include the character from his fiction. History grabbed him up. Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Danton is a huge man, with a face that is hideously scarred after he is gored by a bull as a child, but women find him very attractive. He marries Gabrielle, a café owner’s daughter, in Paris before the Revolution, and has several children by her. Unlike Lucile, Gabrielle is immediately sympathetic. A few brief sections of the novel are told from her point of view, and we find that she does not share her husband’s revolutionary views. 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. Gabrielle loves her husband, though, despite the difference in their views and his many affairs. Later, when asked about his infidelity, Danton says he does it for lust and power. Tragically, Gabrielle dies giving birth to her last child, and a few months later, Danton marries Louise Gély, the fifteen-year-old daughter of his neighbors, who had been helping Gabrielle take care of the children. The marriage lasts less than a year, ending with Danton’s own death.

If you could take any character from A Place of Greater Safety out to dinner, who would it be and why? I’m going to say no, on the whole. Gerald is my first reader, but I don’t ­expect literary criticism from him. He’s not going to say, Oh, that reminds me of something in Muriel Spark. He’s going to react as a human being to it. And isn’t that what we want? I’m sixty-two next month. About four months ago, I noticed that I’m no longer in pain every day. I find myself feeling better than I have since I was twenty, and therefore, I think I can do things. There are a lot of novels I want to write, but there are also plays I want to write. It’s a bit unusual to start at this age, but why not? In 1992, several years before winning the Man Booker prize twice in a row, critically acclaimed English author Hilary Mantel published A Place of Greater Safety, a historical novel set during the events of the French Revolution of 1789. Although it features hundreds of historical figures from the time, the novel focuses on three of the men that played key roles during the upheaval, tracing the lives of Georges-Jacques Danton, a vicious pragmatist with an iron will, Camille Desmoulins, a hyper-verbal and impassioned crusader, and Maximilien Robespierre, the unemotional true believer who created the Reign of Terror. Damian Lewis and Claire Foy as King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in BBC2’s Wolf Hall. Photograph: Ed Miller/BBC/Company Productions LtdThe middle period of Cromwell’s life sees him at the apogee of his success: history’s most successful accountant, a loyal family man and an embodiment of his own maxim: “Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.” Anne Boleyn has been beheaded along with several of his deadliest enemies. But though a sort of peace has broken out, it’s “the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home”. The Mirror and the Light (2020) In this well-researched book, she draws flesh and blood portraits of the leaders of the revolution and what led them to the events of that stormy time. You feel embedded in it, experiencing what drove them from crisis to crisis and directed their actions. You see their relationships, their trials and their temptations. Although the details have to be surmised, they are based on careful analysis of the writings of the real people involved, drawing out their motivations and beliefs.

It's understandable, then, that a late-20th-century novelist, Hilary Mantel, working at a much greater remove, should turn the tables and make the principal figures of the Revolution the main characters in I was on evening duty, and somebody jumped on me. It wasn’t a sexual thing. There were a group of pupils, with one person hitting me. Compared to what could have happened, it was trivial. It was dark, they were not my ­pupils, I couldn’t identify them, the school wasn’t interested in finding out. It was a shambles. I felt unsupported by the headmaster, and so I left, but I didn’t want to go, because I liked my pupils. Yes, and when you realize that, then you can say, I don’t know exactly how this episode occurred, but, for example, I do know where and when it took place. Still, there is much in Ms. Mantel's very long novel that also feels forced. It is not so easy, after all, for a 20th-century author to become an 18th-century revolutionary, and on occasion she writes dialogue that reads like a parody of a historical of memoirs had turned into a major industry, and almost everyone, from Lafayette to Napoleon himself, had his own version of events ready for all to read.Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. Mantel grew up in Hadfield, Derbyshire, a stony town so windswept she was 11 years old before she saw a real rose. Her family was part of a beached and declining Irish Catholic population of immigrant workers: her mother was a mill-girl, her grandmother did not have the luxury of knowing her own birthday. Mantel’s grandfather served in North Africa and her memory of him is thronged by the men who did not come home. At the age of four, she walked into school knowing how to load a machine-gun belt, and waiting for the moment she would become a boy. “My best days,” she writes of this moment, “were behind me.” Hilary Mantel has soaked herself in the history of the period...and a striking picture emerges of the exhilaration, dynamic energy and stark horror of those fearful days.’ Daily Telegraph I was set very early. There was Shakespeare, there was Robert Louis Stevenson, and then there was reading Jane Eyre—specifically Jane Eyre, none of the other Brontë books. I was nine or ten. That was my first experience of realizing that there was another head in the world that felt like mine—the passage right at the beginning, when Jane’s relatives accuse her of being unchildlike. For a young reader that’s an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature. I totally identified with Jane as an unchildlike child. I never was very much interested in her love story. People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life – I mean, cruel people, dangerous people – why do you think they are going to be any better after they’re dead?”