A provocateur with a vulnerable-yet-audacious charm, he is Robespierre's childhood friend and Danton's right-hand man.

Kept his energies focussed on the task in hand, which for him, was to improve the wellbeing and lives of the poor people of France. She is one of those inspiring authors who has been fabulously unafraid of pushing her writing into new physical and literary landscapes.When they have enough to eat and when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous tongues and pens to deceive them; when their interests are identified with the people. If you could take any character from A Place of Greater Safety out to dinner, who would it be and why? The arc of the third and longest part of the trilogy is framed by a conversation between Cromwell and the Spanish ambassador: “What will you do,” asks the ambassador, “when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? And she finally understands, too, how it is impossible to do anything else while you're in Hilary Mantel's world. This story is apparently true and for a moment it made me genuinely pity her as a real person, which isn't all that easy when dealing with such strong historical archetypes.

Get out your encyclopaedias, your Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy, and there is always good old Google. I think this review does a fairly good job of highlighting the merits of a book I love but I have to disagree about the portrayal of the women – don’t see why they would seem any more flawed and unsympathetic than the men. They leave semi-literate notes and mysterious tokens – a new can-opener in the middle of a room – as assurances of their malignity. It chronicles the Revolution through the dynamic relationships between three of its central players: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre.In Mandel’s taut sequel to Wolf Hall, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn have been married for more than two years, but unable to produce a male heir. Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton and Camille Desmoulins: provincial boys given a head start thanks to their preternatural intelligence, living in Paris, hauling themselves up through hard work, surrounded by a profligate and lazy aristocracy. As Fay Weldon wrote in the Guardian: “She has taken the ethereal halfway house between the living and the dead and nailed it on the page. In fact, the historiography of the French Revolution is absolutely saturated with obsessions about such figures.

A couple of years earlier Mantel had published a huge historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, that now looks like invaluable groundwork for her Thomas Cromwell books, but at the time seemed out of the path of her other fiction. This miscellany of 20 pieces includes 30 years of correspondence with her editor at the London Review of Books. Resurrecting Thomas Cromwell may have won her the Booker, twice, but Beyond Black is propelled by an awareness of text as a kind of transubstantiating material, a vehicle for bringing back the dead.Mantel follows them from their childhood, fast-forwarding through their adolescence, to the experience of Revolution of 1789 and the climacteric spring of 1794. I'm sure I will love this book when I can get hold of the cast of characters - it is in the print edition and the kindle edition and is vital to keeping track of the story with hundreds of minor characters. Mysteriously, Evelyn Axon’s daughter Muriel is pregnant, and “Her face wore an expression of daft beatitude. Yes - the book contains so much historical detail that listening to the whole book again will bring out the bits that I missed the first time around (and just be a great pleasure).

Hilary Mantel's gripping account of the cataclysmic events of the French Revolution seen through the eyes of three of its most important figures, George Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maxime Robespierre.

Mantel’s novel makes Jeddah a place of nightmare where Frances experiences something like total erasure.