At six years old he had been taken to Versailles, where he had recited a poem for Mesdames Adelaide, Sophie and Victoire, the old King's daughters; they had made a fuss of him and given him sweets. At first Danton, who is a powerful speaker, is one of the leaders of the Convention, and extremely popular with the common people of Paris. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon. For example, the depictions of the childhoods of the three main characters reminded me of the same technique she uses to first get us engaged in and sympathetic toward Cromwell in Wolf Hall.

There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry. 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.It is to this grammar school that both the young de Robespierre and Desmoulins are sent in the story. In her father's house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. From schooldays on we are taught to regard Robespierre and Danton as evil incarnate, on a par with Hitler and with Stalin: Mantel brings off the not inconsiderable feat of presenting them as fully rounded human beings. From the flintily incorruptible Robespierre to the bullish, sensual Danton and the doomed, romantic Desmoulins, this is historical fiction played out on the grandest canvas.

Even though they do some terrible things, you never quite lose your sympathy for them, or, at least, you understand why they do what they do.

Ultimately, without the need for heightened drama – she doesn’t even depict the death of Robespierre. One of those rare books which has lived with me over the years and which I shall doubtless go back to again and again. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. I found myself reading this lengthy novel compulsively, wanting to know (yet knowing) what would happen next.

My first book was pure wish fulfilment, about a girl who became a dancer, and with the recent publication of a ballet trilogy – Born to Dance, Star Quality and Showtime – I seem to have come full circle. Then there was Louis Suleau, an ironical sort of boy, who smiled when the young aristocrats denigrated the status quo. If you asked him what sort of a person he thought he was, he would tell you he was able, sensitive, patient and deficient in charm. The only slight downside to the book, but bear in mind this is completely down to personal taste, was that at times I felt that as a reader, one had to pay very close attention to Mantel's writing to fully understand her inferences, making it a book best read when fully awake, and not, perhaps the best choice for a relaxing evening read. Once again, Mantel takes a lot for granted in her readers and assumes we understand the context and origins of the politics of the Revolution - she name-checks Tacitus and Rousseau but doesn't explore their influence in any great detail.He had a strong sympathy with the poor, which made him very popular, at first in his hometown of Arras and, later, as a deputy to the Estates General and the National Assembly at Versailles and Paris. We have countless women who for the most part just wait while the men execute their opportunistic and not overtly well thought out plans. In her version of events, Marat goes to Danton and Desmoulins with his idea of massacring the prisoners, and they are horrified at first, but eventually go along with it, although they come up with lists of people to be spared. Everything astonishes him: his father's diatribes, the speckles on an eggshell, women's hats, ducks on the pond. There is sexual freedom/decadence, like being best friends with your wife’s lover, which brings enormous subplots and intrigue with it.