SOURCE: “The French Revolution as Fiction,” in Spectator, Vol. 269, No. 8565, September 5, 1992, p. 30.

In the following review, Spivey places A Place of Greater Safety within the context of other novels based on the French Revolution.

This [A Place of Greater Safety] is a tale of three men: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. Superficially, their early lives in provincial France do not seem packed with radical promise. Danton, following a Champenois usage, was put to suckle on a cow's udder at the age of two, and badly gored by a bull. At subsequent junctures of his youth he was beset again by farmyard beasts, and also by smallpox, leaving him heartily ugly and fairly glad, one imagines, to have made it as far as adulthood. Desmoulins and Robespierre, from Guise and Arras respectively, met at the same college in Paris. Robespierre, a scholarship boy, delivered a Latin panegyric...