The New York Times praised Mantel, but not the book, wondering if "more novel and less history might not better suit this author's unmistakable talent. He was taken up by Stanislas Fréron, who was five years older, who was named after his godfather, the King of Poland. It was to be Louis-le-Grand, the best school in the country, where the sons of the aristocracy were educated--a school that looked out for talent, too, and where a boy with no fortune might get on. He is never absent for very long, though, since, even when he is not actually present, people talk about him.

It is interesting that Mantel chose not to focus on Marat, the sickly revolutionary leader who was famously stabbed to death in his bathtub, but instead his contemporaries, about whom there is less knowledge, particularly surrounding their private lives. One of Britain’s greatest living novelists, Hilary Mantel published her first novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, in 1988.Jacqueline Carraut's love affair occupied the spring and summer of 1757, and by Michaelmas she knew she was pregnant. Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies , which both won the Booker Prize. 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. So great a hold did it have over me that I began quite obsessively to seek out every book I could lay hands on that dealt either with the Revolution itself or with the principal players. This is a magnificent achievement, gripping and engrossing, and a strident demonstration of how historical fiction can compliment the academic.

You feel, by the end, that you have not so much been reading a book about the French Revolution as having actually been part of the experience. There were two dogs running after him with their tails between their legs; trailing behind came Anne-Madeleine, bawling with rage and despair.It concerns the events of the French Revolution, focusing on the lives of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre from their childhood through the execution of the Dantonists, and also featuring hundreds of other historical figures. An impressive debut; it's not often such a long novel kept me engaged, but in the end too long and maybe too admiring towards the main characters to really capture the heart. In Mantel’s version of events, he is bisexual, but I do not know whether this is true of the real Desmoulins or not. 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. Now that the last red tile has been laid on the roof of the New House, now that the marriage contract is four years old.