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" Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction. "

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" The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 was very practical and sensible. "

" In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across. "

" Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be. "

" One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. "

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

" When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient. "

" 'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular. "

" I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs. "

" I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40. "

" It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I've behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven't behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you're a woman, you're not in a position to behave as badly, because you don't have the economic power. "

" 'Philomena' was even better than I had expected. I was so pleased to see the evil Irish nuns thoroughly exposed, and I thought Judi Dench gave a flawless performance, as did everybody else. "

" I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people. "

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

" 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. "

" I have been left-wing always, from childhood. "

" All writers behave badly. All people behave badly. "

" I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man. "

" Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington. "

" Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies. "

" Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance. "

" Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs. "