“... to add that the same author wrote two books, one enormous, about D.H. Lawrence, and also fathered Claire Tomalin.) Since 1968, algorithm has also had a medical sense meaning a sort of diagnostic flow-chart. There is no mention here of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, in which the word is famously used or abused. How we did without it for so long is a ...”

“... viable. Thus Victoria Glendinning pays tribute here to the imaginative patronage she received from Claire Tomalin, who consistently used her various editorships to advance talented women. Similarly, it is no accident that the most successful London club open to both sexes is Groucho’s, which caters primarily to media types. But outside this rare ...”

“... has ‘the dawn is wanly blueing’ in Sea and Sardinia.) It is one of the signal pleasures of Claire Tomalin’s superb new biography that she has an eye for this kind of thing in Hardy, and quotes so well from him. We know a good critic is at work from the start, when she mentions in her prologue the poem ‘The Voice’, which recalls the young ...”

“... Claire Clairmont was, briefly, Byron’s mistress, and the mother of his child Allegra. But was she also Shelley’s lover? Did she become pregnant by him? Did she give birth to his child? From the journals, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking and published in 1986, it seems clear that she was in love with Shelley at the age of 16 ...”

“... It doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that he could treat women badly. Twenty years ago, Claire Tomalin made his hypocrisies apparent in The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, an account of Nelly’s struggles as the illicit lover of the nation’s celebrated defender of domestic virtue. ...”

“... they passed to Ellen when she was 21. The Pilgrim editors summarise and endorse the case made by Claire Tomalin in her biography of Ternan and by other scholars that Dickens put up the money. He also wrote to theatre managers in London and Paris to try and advance the performing careers of Fanny and Maria Ternan. When he has doubts about accepting a ...”

“... Buckinghamshire, or they could lose the whole shebang.In Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002), Claire Tomalin calls what followed a ‘tragi-comedy’. Her account, which has become the standard narrative of the diary’s transcription, has Neville hiring an impecunious undergraduate, John Smith, to produce a readable version of Pepys’s diary ...”

“... that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does not discuss the ...”

“... his friend Henry Porter, who was working on the Sunday Times, sent him a letter apparently from Claire Tomalin, the paper’s literary editor, asking him to review Mae West Is Dead, Adam Mars-Jones’s selection of lesbian and gay fiction, adding that she would ‘expect a generous piece’. Waugh duly relayed this breach of professional etiquette to ...”

“... quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some facts are incontrovertible. The Beauchamps had five children who survived infancy; Kathleen was in the middle. Her father ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s ‘plagiarism’ of this story (a transgression for which, according to Claire Tomalin, she was blackmailed by her former lover, Florian Sobienowski) differs dramatically from the Garnett version. Whereas Garnett is everything a good translator should be, the ideal blend of saint and valet. Mansfield obtrudes everywhere, as an ...”

“... six at the time) and frowning on every contact between them and her. In Charles Dickens: A Life, Claire Tomalin remarks, ‘The spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying,’ to the point, she adds, that ‘you want to avert your eyes.’ Gottlieb is just as uneasy ...”

“... for my political views. I am an old modernian. 26 October. An interesting letter this morning from Claire Tomalin about the Drummer Hodge scene in The History Boys, saying that, contrary to what Hector specifically asserts in the scene, Hodge was not in the ordinary sense a name but like, as it were, Joe Bloggs, a generic name for a common and unthinking ...”

“... dislike Mrs Norris for her cruelty and to admire Fanny for her forbearance. Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin sees Mrs Norris as ‘one of the great villains of literature’; Tony Tanner thought she was ‘one of Jane Austen’s most impressive creations and indeed one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction’. All this is clear, at times ...”

“... tended to lean on chronology, and often that has meant seeing Emma’s death as the making of him (Claire Tomalin began her biography by saying: ‘This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet’). But he was a great poet decades before this, and from the start he was measuring his own sensations by the strain he felt around other couples. At ...”