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
school
Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington.
expressing few interest several songs time whose work
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.
I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.
I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
information
I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.
certainly christmas works
'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.
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.
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.
people behave
All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.
people remember quiet
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.
people regularly since
I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.
people closest written
All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
children vulnerable fortune
Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.