Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
