The split among the three main characters is powerfully portrayed. Danton and Desmoulins wish to end all the killing, and Desmoulins writes against the Terror in his newspaper. Robespierre and other members of the Committee of Public Safety have them arrested, along with various thieves and financial schemers in whose plots Danton was involved. Even then, Robespierre feels guilt over turning against his friend Desmoulins, but in the end he chooses power over friendship. There is one scene, which may be Mantel’s invention, where Robespierre visits Desmoulins in prison and offers to spare his life if he will testify against Danton and the others, but Desmoulins refuses. Danton and Desmoulins, along with their fellow prisoners, are guillotined in April 1794. Lucile Desmoulins, who approaches various people in Paris in an attempt to rescue her husband, is guillotined shortly afterwards.

Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. 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.

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It was because of a newspaper article. This was in 1992. I had four books out. I had my reviewing career. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was getting somewhere. And there was this monster book on the shelf. I hadn’t looked into it for years. I thought, What if it’s no good? Because if it is no good, then that’s my twenties written off. And it also means that I commenced my career with a gigantic mistake. But inside me there was still a belief that it would be published one day. And a friend of mine, the Irish writer Clare Boylan, rang me up and said she was doing an article for the Guardian about people’s unpublished first novels, and had I got one? I could have lied, but it was as if the devil jumped out of my mouth, and I said, Yes, I have! And of course she rang around a number of authors, and they were saying things like, Yes, I wrote my first novel at the age of eight, and I’ve still got it in a shoe box. I was the only person who actually wanted to see her first novel published. On my way to deliver it to my agent, I had lunch with another novelist. The manuscript was a huge parcel under my chair—­unwelcome, like a surprise guest. We should have given it a chair to itself. He said, Don’t do it. I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to ­become a historian. So it began as second best. I had to tell myself a story about the French Revolution—the story of the revolution by some of the people who made it, rather than by the revolution’s enemies. Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. The novel is written in darting, suggestive sentences; the dialogue, in all its stoical tones and elements of good and bad humour, is like a chorus, or a commentary on life and its hardships. Using hints and clues, a deceptive indirection, Mantel allows us to enter the wounded spirit of her giant and the restless mind of the inquiring and ambitious doctor-cum-bodysnatcher. Their circling of each other is conducted with slow subtlety, but also with an unsparing sense of doom.

Ms. Mantel, who has published four previous novels in her native Britain, is a gifted writer, so this is a hard question to answer. As a work of fiction, "A Place of Greater Safety" is unquestionably a success. Ms. Mantel understands how people

Well, it’s contemporary English inflected with Tudor English. Just as with A Place of Greater Safety, if I could get contemporary dialogue, I wanted to use it, and blend it into my own dialogue. Only there the contemporary source would be in French, so the questions weren’t quite the same. I needed to write so that I could quote a passage of early Tudor English intact and smooth my invented dialogue in and out of it, so that one tapers into the other and no one can see the join. The decisions about language are taken around that necessity. I spend time working on individual words, but I spend more time making sure that the thought processes are congruent with the era, so that the metaphors are ones by which sixteenth-century people could live. They can’t talk about evolution, they can’t talk about their egos. The metaphors they build must be drawn from, say, their religious worldview.

events: we pass from the inebriating hopes of the early Revolution to the undiluted tragedy of the Terror, and everything we have learned about the characters helps us to understand how this has happened. are we reading history amplified by the empathy of the novelist or fiction dressed up in historical costume? 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. It means a great deal of unselfishness on Gerald’s part. I worry about that. Somebody said to him last week, Isn’t it like being Mrs. Thatcher’s husband? Which I thought was unflattering to us both. The other thing I worry about is if he’s lonely, because I’m preoccupied with my work and I don’t expect to have people around me, whereas Gerald had colleagues all those years. However, with these theater productions, we’re plunged into a world of sociability. And he’s become part of the group.All her life, Mantel has suffered from a painful, debilitating illness, which was first misdiagnosed and treated with antipsychotic drugs. In Botswana, through reading medical textbooks, she identified and diagnosed her own disease, a severe form of endometriosis. Since then, Mantel has written a great deal about the female body, her own and ­others’. An essay that begins with a consideration of Kate Middleton’s wardrobe and moves on to a discussion of the royal body generated so much controversy that (as she told the New Statesman) “if the pressmen saw any fat woman of a certain age walking along the street, they ran after her shouting, ‘Are you Hilary?’ ” 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. lives. Great families, very lately at the peak of their splendor, struggled to survive; newcomers rose dramatically, from workman to marshal of France or, in the most celebrated case, from impoverished lieutenant to emperor. The thing you’ve got to understand about sixteenth-century life is that male friendship is much more important than your marriage. My take on this Cromwell marriage is that it’s not a love match, it’s a business arrangement. Though they come to love each other, it’s not a great romance. They’re not together very much. He’s virtually a stranger to his younger daughter. So far, so typical. I think the reason I decided to make it a good marriage, rather than a bad marriage, is that after her death, he remained within her family network. Her family continued to live with him. We know a lot more about the marriage of Ralph Sadler, Cromwell’s . . . uh, PA. That was an unlikely marriage because it was a love match. This is something that’s possible in this era. Look at poor Henry himself—he’s the one who’s really ahead of his time, he’s such a romantic. Desmoulins is a charming character, a lawyer and journalist, who is not afraid to criticize the old regime, and later becomes a leading figure in the Revolution as the publisher and main author of the newspaper Révolutions de France. He is the link between the other two main characters, Danton and Robespierre. As children, he and Robespierre, both from not particularly wealthy families in northern France, attend Louis-le-Grand, one of the most prestigious boarding schools in Paris, as scholarship students. Robespierre is lonely at school and Desmoulins becomes his friend. Danton, who comes from a rural area in northeastern France, has little formal education, but qualifies as a lawyer and goes to Paris, where he becomes friends with Desmoulins, who is, by this time, a struggling young lawyer there. Danton and Robespierre eventually become colleagues in the National Convention and, for a time at least, political allies, but they are not close personal friends in the same way each is a close friend of Desmoulins. I also have to say, as much as I enjoyed reading about Danton and Robespierre, and Mantel’s characterization of them, I missed Desmoulins when he was absent from the book. He is never absent for very long, though, since, even when he is not actually present, people talk about him.