Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.

People are much more interesting than people realise.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.