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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Claire Tomalin

Quiet

Meet

" 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. "

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

" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing. "

" '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. "

" Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films. "

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

Claire Tomalin

World

Energy

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

" 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. "

" Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "