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

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" Dickens is always full of surprises. "

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

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

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

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

" People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels. "

" I would like to have a more social life than I have. "

" I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am. "

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

" 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. "

" I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious. "

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

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

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can't fail to love the man - so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming. "

" 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. "

" I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life. "

" Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it. "

" Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans. "

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

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