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“... The year​ we killed our teacher we were ten, going on eleven. Mitch went first, the terrier, a snappy article with a topknot tied with a tartan ribbon. The morning we saw him we hooted. He didn’t like us laughing and he flew to the end of his lead, and reared up snarling and drooling. ‘Hark at the rat,’ we said. Rose Cullan said: ‘Hark at Lucifer ...”

“... In the spring of 1750, children began to disappear from the streets of Paris. Some were big boys of 14 or 15, others were mites of five or six years old. When beggar children vanished, no one much noticed, but when the children of tradespeople and craftworkers were missed panic spread through working-class districts and into the city at large. Schoolmasters put up notices asking parents to escort their children to and from school, as they could not be responsible for their safety ...”

“... One summer at the fag-end of the 1990s, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I’d agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or some other diversion ...”

“... When I left St George’s Hospital, I imagined that aspects of my past had been excised, cut cleanly away. My long scar would knit and the memory of the pain would fade. For a time I went backwards and forwards, between England and Africa, and in the end I tried to put down roots in the colder climate, and make my way alone. But by 1982 I was sick again, pain slicing through my vital organs and leaving me breathless in public places, leaning against a grimy wall at Euston Station, or clinging like a derelict to a park bench ...”

“... For a time, early last year, there was no trace of Robespierre to be found on the street where he lived in the days of his fame. The restaurant called Le Robespierre had closed its doors, and after a while its portrait sign was removed from above the entrance of the house on the rue Saint-Honoré. Once again, the plaque on the wall had been smashed ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lastly,’​ Mr Maddox said, ‘and to conclude our tour, we come to a very special part of the house.’ He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’ Marcella put her hand to her mouth. ‘God help them. The family go in together, or one at a time?’ ‘There is capacity for all the family,’ Mr Maddox said ...”

“... By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time I tried to put my finger on it.When I packed my bags for London, at 18 years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury ...”

“... You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners ...”

“... that can be discerned and appraised. We can begin to compare our lives with those of our mothers. Hilary Mantel, born in 1952, has tried out a number of female identities – more than most of us – and succeeded more than most. She has trained as a lawyer and given it up, she has been a social worker and a teacher, she has earned a living in the Middle ...”

“... all humbug. The case against the historical novel could hardly be better put; and faced with Hilary Mantel’s latest work, a mammoth 870-page-long novel set in the French Revolution, one is inclined to ask oneself some general questions: as, for instance, whether Henry James wasn’t right about the genre, or whether perhaps reading too much Henry ...”

“... novel, which is bold and contemporary to the point of being barefaced. Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel, gives an askew view of the hazards of modern suburban living, what with juvenile satanism, old-age satyriasis, community services going awry, and households bedevilled in one way or another. This novel is a sequel to Every day is mother’s ...”

“... it cheers you up. On first acquaintance, it would be hard to think of a less cheering book than Hilary Mantel’s Fludd. The small Northern town in which it is set is magnificently evoked as the most dispiriting place under the sun. Not that the sun often shines on the dismal streets of Fetherhoughton – and its women, formidable though they ...”

“... and apparently humane, surgeon. It is a myth that returns in a new and haunting form in Hilary Mantel’s latest novel, where the stories of Hunter and of his Giant tell us of the horror, rather than the wonder, of life. The imagined lives of these two characters are interleaved, as history draws them together. And it is Hunter, in ...”