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“... on occasion the two griefs were connected, as in the case of little Clara’s death in Venice and Claire Clairmont, the ever-intrusive stepsister. Sadly, while Shelley saw all this and put on record his disappointment with Mary, he could not see her greatest gift to him, since it was posthumous: the collecting and annotation of his poems for the editions of ...”

“... Mary who? was the person I mostly seemed to be dealing with in the early Seventies, when I wrote a biography of the extraordinary woman whose works have now been collected for the first time, nearly two hundred years after her death. And ‘Mary Who?’ is still the common form of her name, outside a small circle of specialists and enthusiasts. People stumble over the three simple syllables; its awkwardness has stood in the way of her fame ...”

“... George Henry Lewes was a close contemporary of Dickens, born five years after him, in 1817, and dying eight years after him, in 1878. Both men worked themselves to the limits of their strength and endurance, and probably shortened their lives by doing so; both tend to be seen as prototypical Victorians, whereas they were formed by the Regency period and kept a certain flamboyance, together with a dislike of the insularity and hypocrisy to which they saw England succumbing ...”

“... generations the overflowings of [my] mind ...’ The passage is quoted both by Paul Dawson and Claire Tomalin, and I can give no better indication of the different styles and standpoints of their two books than by reproducing their comments on it. Dr Dawson, whose work is a detailed, scholarly study of Shelley’s political ideas, writes with ...”

“... 1867 – was lost or, more likely, stolen in America. It resurfaced in 1943. ‘Since then,’ as Claire Tomalin puts it, ‘scholars have been squeezing it like a tiny sponge for every drop of information it can yield.’ Scholars justify their curiosity on the grounds that anything which throws light on Dickens’s art is justified, however faint that ...”

“... the business pages; the whole ‘Screen’ department; the Literary department, which consists of Claire Tomalin (editor), me (deputy) and Anne Boston; and the Arts Editor, John Whitley. (The Deputy Arts Editor, ex-Sun journalist Penny Perrick, and the arts sub-editor, Nigella Lawson, have gone to Wapping.) The first meeting of the ...”

“... Forthergill produced a lengthy and appreciative study of Mrs Jordan as an actress. Why, then, has Claire Tomalin, a biographer who excels in the recovery of the lives of lost women, sought to tell again a story which has already been more than thrice-told? One clear reason is that, notwithstanding the more tolerant attitude of the 20th century, she still ...”

“... Did Shelley have sex with Claire Clairmont? I first heard this central question debated with great solemnity at a meeting of the Byron Society in Albemarle Street way back in 1978. I went with three fellow Shelleyans, Geoffrey Matthews, Claire Tomalin and Judith Chernaik, to hear Marion Stocking talk about Claire ...”

“... in A Man of Parts (2011), while four fully annotated volumes of his letters came out in 1998. Claire Tomalin is one of the most highly acclaimed biographers of our time, with numerous prizes and accolades for her studies of Pepys, Dickens, Hardy and others. Her name on the title-page of a biography serves as a kitemark of quality, though in truth ...”

“... bicentenary. John Sutherland has added them up: there have now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters and Slater’s own editions of Dickens’s ...”

“... work of a number of major figures, most notably D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In her foreword, Tomalin (who refers to Mansfield throughout as Katherine) points out that she is ‘of the same sex as my subject. It may be nonsense to believe that this gives me any advantage over a male biographer. Yet I can’t help feeling that any woman who fights her way ...”

“... interest in the same way or to the same degree to his readers as he had been fifteen years before. Claire Tomalin’s biography is a splendid work. She likes Pepys, and she shares her subject’s fascination with detail. Her description of the operation to remove the ‘stone’ in his urinary tract which had plagued him throughout his early years is so ...”

“... biographies appeared in as many years. Charlotte Gordon relies on the work done at this time by Claire Tomalin, Lyndall Gordon, Janet Todd and Miranda Seymour: her innovation is to narrate the lives in alternate chapters, which allows the two stories to echo each other (though the jumps in chronology are confusing). In 1885 the Athenaeum described ...”

“... so often resistant to history, gain access to this most secretive and parochial of writers? Claire Tomalin’s publishers credit her with discovering an Austen who is the heroine of a modern story, one of a family of meritocrats struggling to get ahead in a competitive, money-driven society. At it happens, much academic work on the Romantic ...”

“... life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of ...”