On March 25, 1989, Hilary Mantel reviewed Stephen Frears' new film, Dangerous Liaisons, in the English weekly Spectator.

The film adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' epistolary novel is better than expected, she wrote, thanks largely to Glenn Close and John Malkovich in the lead roles.

A serious mistake, however, lies in the fact that the director has retained “the good manners of Hollywood costume drama”: “Everything is pretty and flawless in this vacuum world;

everything shimmers.

The Paris of 1780 didn't shimmer: it was notorious for its filth, even by the standards of the time.”

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Film critic Mantel knew what she was talking about.

Fifteen years earlier, she had begun work on a historical novel that would tell the story of the French Revolution through the eyes of its three main protagonists, Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins.

In A Place of Greater Safety, Paris is as filthy as Frears couldn't be, and immaculate Robespierre is shown sadly deflowering his fiancée.

However, the book was not published until 1992, and its German translation under the title "Brüder" was not published until 2012. The genius of fame, one could say, showed bad manners in dealing with Hilary Mantel: he postponed her discovery for too long.

The smell of the gutter clings to all those who act

Mantel found real fame in 2009 when her novel Wolves won the Booker Prize.

While the revolution panorama still adhered to the rules of the genre and unwound its plot in the imperfect tense, the biography of Thomas Cromwell, who, as Henry VIII's all-powerful minister, implemented the Reformation in England, completed a Copernican turn in the historical genre.

The book is consistently told in the present tense, it pulls the action into the present and forces us to immerse ourselves in it like in a film.

And, of course, nothing is pretty and spotless here, the smell of the gutter clinging to everyone involved, even the king, who wants a male heir so badly that he casts out or has beheaded wives after wives.

The only one who recognizes this and knows how to use it for himself is Cromwell, with whom Hilary Mantel has created a literary figure of the century: the power man who is both the string puller and the puppet of earthly conditions.

She rejects Brexit, as does the Catholic Church

"Wolves" was followed by "Falcons" and "Mirror and Light", a second time (and as the first author ever) Mantel won the Booker Prize, the Queen named her Dame Hilary, and sales of her books rose to incredible levels.

But that doesn't mean that Hilary Mantel has become a tame classic.

Nine years ago she took on the British press and the Prime Minister when she described the Duchess of Cambridge as a mannequin, and a year later she provoked the conservative public with a story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

She rejects Brexit, as does the Catholic Church.

The fearlessness with which she expresses her point of view may have something to do with the fact that she had to struggle with a serious illness as a young woman, a period of suffering that she described impressively in her autobiography "Von Geist und Geistern".

Today, Dame Hilary Mantel, who has transformed her film-critical view into sovereign storytelling, is seventy years old.