A Place of Greater Safety

Uh, if you wanna say hello in the chat, that would be lovely, but it's, you know, it's very much a, a space for you to step into And for your nervous system to know because of the repetition week on week, to know that this is a place where you are safe enough.

When I first started thinking about a piece of quiet and the whole idea of it, um, a phrase from a, um, Hilary Mantel novel, uh, kept coming up in my head, and the novel is called A Place of Greater Safety.

And I just ...

My body loves that idea.

And how do we create environments which are safe enough for us? How do we become a space which is safe enough for other people? And I feel really strongly that right now there's an enormous need.

Ooh, it makes me want to cry.

There's such an enormous need globally for us all to become a place of greater safety for other humans.

But more than that, to be the place of greatest safety for ourselves.

... which is currently on the long list for the Booker, and almost all the books I love most are big swings.

I, I love a book that aims very high, like, uh, A Place of Greater Safety or The Count of Monte Cristo or Emma, all of them a big swing.

No matter what the, the sort of, uh, physical space, a big emotional swing.

Black Bag is a massive swing.

You know, I'm reading...

I'm reading a hunk of a book by Hilary Mantel called A Place of Greater Safety about the French Revolution.

I read the Wolf Hall trilogy in the past two years, and then I gave myself a break, and I thought I'd try again.

Places of Greater Safety, which French Revolution is a topic that's sort of like eternally interesting to me.

Literally.

This directly inspired her 1992 novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which was about the French Revolution.

Then look at her 20s.

In 1970, she goes to the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield to study law.

She lives in Botswana from 1977 to 1980 because of her husband's work.

Then she spends time in Saudi Arabia in the mid-'80s.

These experiences inspire two novels, Eight Months on Gaza Street and A Change of Climate, and she wins a travel writing prize in 1987.

She's just collecting lives at this point.

They're turning the melodrama right up to the maximum.

So Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, or Hilary Mantel in A Place of Greater Safety.

But in this series, we will be looking behind those images to explore exactly what happened and why, and we have an amazing cast of characters.

So we'll be talking about, um, the revolutionaries, people like Danton and Robespierre.