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

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

" I always try to travel light. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Dickens is always full of surprises. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 belongs to the English people. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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

" 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'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. "

" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "