SOURCE: “Citizens’ Band,” in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 121, No. 4100, September 4, 1992, p. 38.

In the following mixed review of A Place of Greater Safety, Morton contends that Mantel “has made an accomplished job of a near-impossible outline.”

Last month Hilary Mantel lent her increasingly weighty imprimatur to a historical novel called Malefice. She wrote that its author, Leslie Wilson, “lets the voices of her characters speak directly from their century to ours—and what they speak of are the constants of the human condition, the drive to power and the need for love.” It's hard to imagine that she wasn't subsconsciously drafting the reviews for A Place of Greater Safety, her own massive fly-on-wall reconstruction of the French Revolution.

Perhaps nowhere has bicentennial revisionism been taken to such remarkable and deflationary lengths. In Mantel's version, the Revolution emerges as a career move for a tightknit group of disaffected ABs. With...