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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
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. Claire Tomalin Read Quote
