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" Dickens is always full of surprises. "

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" After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters. "

" In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad. "

" 'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat. "

" Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner. "

" The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it. "

" I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book. "

" Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them. "

" Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century. "

" I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster. "

" You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them. "

" Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples. "

" Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading. "

" I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published. "

" Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians. "

" I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures. "

" Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem. "

" As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice. "

" Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings. "

" As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel. "

" When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature. "

" I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts. "

" By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all. "

" It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration. "

" When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common. "

" Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor. "

" All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends. "

" I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously. "

" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "

" If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch. "

" The book doesn't end when you finish writing it. "