Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalinis an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 June 1933
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People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
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Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
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Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'Philomena' was even better than I had expected. I was so pleased to see the evil Irish nuns thoroughly exposed, and I thought Judi Dench gave a flawless performance, as did everybody else.
It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.
life
I would like to have a more social life than I have.
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Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
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Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.