Dangerous liaisons - Telegraph Hilary Mantel "uses prose to do what she wants to do, like a singer or a pianist" said the chairman of the Man Booker panel that gave her the prize for the second time. It is good for the nation to have its imagination caught by such a writer, rather than by a name who merely fits in with the fashionable Zeitgeist. That is not to say that Hilary Mantel is not dangerous. Danger is her métier. This is a woman who remembers as a child seeing the devil, and not just seeing but looking. She writes historical fiction that makes readers feel how history might have felt. Such is her power of looking as well as seeing that (in an earlier novel) she could make Robespierre sympathetic, as she has Thomas Cromwell. Now at the height of her powers, she is working on the third in the trilogy. Will it win the Booker, too? If anyone can claim such a hat-trick, it is surely Mantel.