I may, in fact - both book and subject matter being so complicated - end up writing more about my own reaction to it than an actual bona fide review. As a young man, Desmoulins falls in love with Annette, the mother, who refuses to have sexual relations with him. 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. He would stand in front of a mirror to scrutinize his face, to see if his teeth stuck out or if he looked timid.

At the same time Mantel never tries to deceive the reader, she points up her modern idiom, openly admits that Danton never wrote anything down, but slyly asks if perhaps we can hear his voice nevertheless and then provides us with that voice, makes use of documents and original sources, and then juxtaposes them with conversations between two characters that of course can only be imagined. The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow. Upon his arrival he sat down to make a note of everything he had seen on the journey, because then he would have done his duty to it, and need not carry it around in his head.We choose our own recommendations: fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry, nature writing; in fact anything other than children's books, and not necessarily newly-published. The eldest girl was persistently sick, servants took advantage and the household budget required time-consuming economies. Brilliant, edgy historical fiction that captures the whiplash flux of the French Revolution with crisp immediacy on the page. I found that with some of the characters I didn’t really see why Hilary Mantel spent so much time introducing them, but then later in the book I wished I had paid a bit more attention to who they were. I think that what Mantel is saying is that, during these violent events, the grave is the only safe place.

Jean-Nicolas exacted all this from her; on top of it, he wanted her to pay attention to his feelings.She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. I came to this extremely long novel not because I had any particular interest in the French Revolution, but because I fell in love with Mantel’s writing in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and wanted to read more of her work.

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. This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought: that the worse things get, the better they get. The line of damage ran down the side of his cheek, and intruded a purple-brown spur into his upper lip.We see glimpses of tensions that shaped the revolutionaries world, like Paris versus the rest of the country, but in the end I felt I got very little external background on France and Europe and the struggles driving the main characters.

Already we can see the stylistic quirks and techniques that Mantel has made her own: the sardonic view of history, the arch wit (too arch in too many places, here), the adoption of positively anachronistic speech so that characters feel like our contemporaries (a comment on how we always read 'history' via the horizons of our present?There was one paragraph where they gang raped a woman, cut her head off, ripped her heart out and drank her blood. Events get out of control, though, and the people carrying out the massacres ignore the lists, or they trick people by promising to let them go and then killing them as soon as they are outside the prison walls.