Quotes from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.' A story reflects life but also redeems it: assembled on the page, even unpredictable events can be plotted, their random scatter made part of a meaningful design.

On Dickens) No other writer is quite as good at making marriage vows about remaining together "till death us do part" sound more like a suicide pact.

unfamiliar lens; repeatedly, he takes the raw materials of life and reshapes them into teasing fragments of narrative. All that is missing is a plot where they can snap into place.

translation. The first indication that Carroll

his style. "Brighten it, brighten it, brighten it!" he once instructed his subeditor W. H. Wills, after reading an article that was insufficiently "Dickensian

immediately noticed the "splendid library, of course, with soft carpet, couches etc, such as became a sympathiser with the suffering classes." Her withering conclusion was "How can we sufficiently pity the needy unless we know fully the blessings of the plenty?" This autumn she

Dickens gave his readers history on a human scale.

edging his way closer to the writing of a novel in which he would remind his readers that telegrams and railways weren't the only ways in which they were all connected.