Hilary Mantel

Elizabeth Marsh was one of those shaken by the times she lived through, her personal ‘ordeal’ intimately connected with global forces beyond the grasp of any individual then living. Conceived in Port Royal, born in Portsmouth, she ‘travelled further and more dangerously by sea and in four continents than any female contemporary for whom records survive’. Her father was Milbourne Marsh, a carpenter from an English family whose fortunes were connected to the sea.

He expected it to end badly, and it did: a bullet from a pistol which shattered his jaw, a night of unspeaking agony, death without trial. During that night – ninth Thermidor, or 27 July 1794 – he made signs that he wanted a pen and paper. What would he have written? We cannot hope that it would have helped us understand him. He’d had his chance, you’d think: five years in politics. The historian George Rudé estimates that Robespierre made some nine hundred speeches. He had spoken, of course; but had he been heard?

The lie is told to a man he meets on the road; it is America, fall, the mid-1990s, when he stops to pick up a hitch-hiker in Upper New York State. It is almost the day of the dead, and he is tired, tired of himself and his history, wishing on himself a sort of disembodiment, or perhaps the kind of paper mask that, as he mentions in one of his poems, he used to make at Halloween as a child in school.

“Neil Belton’s account of one year of Schrödinger’s life is bleak, judicious, thickly atmospheric. No kind of weather suits this latitude: winter is a raw season of privation – cold bathwater and rationing – and summer leaves the clerks and shop assistants ‘stunned and listless’ in their shirtsleeves on Stephen’s Green, while the smell of the river envelops the Georgian slums with their gaping doors and shattered fanlights. The city, censored and self-censoring, is constantly listening into itself, and testing the power of silence. Ireland’s citizens, like the physicists of the time, need to accommodate themselves to duality, coexist with paradox. Schrödinger is an honest and searching observer, but his role is limited; it is a brutal physical fact that he is losing his sight. His work does not progress. His home life is miserable; Hilde, for whose sake he endured sweating and chancy interviews with the Irish authorities, has become both emotionally and physically disengaged from him. He feels Ireland to be a sort of Limbo; Limbo, his unhappy wife points out, lies close to Hell.”