A Place of Greater Safety

by Hilary Mantel

His body seemed strange and precarious, made of shadows and angles.

He felt a great inarticulate weight inside him.

The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against.

making the most of his capacity to drive people to a finger-twitching fury, or into a long, swooning, sentimental decline from sense.

Mirabeau said: ‘Liberty’s a bitch who likes to be fucked on a mattress of corpses.’ He knows this is true: but he will find some gentler way of presenting it to his reader.

No, of course he is not dying. Nobody actually dies of the things that are wrong with him, they just have their lives made harder.