SOURCE: “Three Precocious Pals,” in Observer, August 30, 1992, p. 50.

In the following essay, Saynor offers an unfavorable review of A Place of Greater Safety.

It's not easy running the French Revolution from home—what with writ-servers camped outside and strangers tramping in and out at all hours, and piles of old newspapers everywhere and that creepy Robespierre hovering about like an undertaker. Over at Mrs Danton's, things aren't much better. There are the escalating membership fees to the Jacobin Club to worry about, and a visiting mother-in-law who moans, ‘This wallpaper must have cost a pretty penny.’

Writing convincing historical fiction is always a head-on-the-block exercise. In A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel takes an appropriately bourgeois-democratic approach to the problem by reducing some of the most awesome, paradigm-shattering events in European history to a mosaic of homespun moments in the lives of three young political idealists—Robespierre...