Hilary Mantel

Despite his careful and no doubt deeply felt disclaimers, it sometimes sounds as if Eamon Duffy is cheering on the executioners. Fires of Faith, powerful and interesting in its own right, is an addendum to his huge enterprise The Stripping of the Altars, published in 1992, in which he contended that ‘late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation.’

If you put your head out of the window of the café Procope, almost everyone you needed to overthrow the regime was within shouting distance. The Revolution was dreamed here before it was enacted, beneath the dark corners of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d'Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order.

I was a social work assistant, paid a very small sum by the NHS and meant to be learning on the job, pending some formal traineeship that never in fact materialised. No one knew what I was for or how I should spend my days. Sometimes the real social workers took me out with them to other hospitals in the group: the Home for Incurables, for instance, or the busy, modern general hospital where I once saw a young doctor looking at X-ray plates upside down.

In my Catholic girlhood she was everywhere, perched up on ledges and in niches like a CCTV camera, with her painted mouth and her painted eyes of policeman blue. She was, her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole.

In those days, the doorbell didn’t ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house. Only at a persistent ring would I creep over the carpets, as if there were someone to disturb, and make my way to the front door with its spyhole. We were big on bolts and shutters, deadlocks and mortises, safety chains and windows that were high and barred. Through the spyhole I saw a distraught man in a crumpled, silver-grey suit: thirties, Asian. He had dropped back from the door, and was looking about him, at the closed and locked door opposite, and up the dusty marble stairs. He patted his pockets, took out a balled-up handkerchief, and rubbed it across his face. He looked so fraught that his sweat could have been tears. I opened the door.