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
adored baby both cambridge clothes crying delightful football full grey handsome husband machines men morning park playing sunday three vivid washing
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.
bad behaviour dickens faithfully love man present shock trying
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.
attention children dreadful flickering programmes
Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
writers
Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.
love normal people quite
I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.
applied days deputy editor heard job literary remember three work
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.
jane likely
I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.
book despised english medieval saved
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.
sad
I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
people regularly since
I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.
critic glorious literary
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.
kept quite realised
When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.
information
I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.