I'm a worrier by nature.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

'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.

Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington.

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.

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.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

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.

It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.

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.

Dickens was very practical and sensible.