CLAIRE TOMALIN

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

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 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.

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

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

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

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 was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.

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.

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.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

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

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

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

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

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

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

'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.

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.

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

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

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.