Claire Tomalin Popular Books
Claire Tomalin Biography & Facts
Claire Tomalin (née Delavenay; born 20 June 1933) is an English journalist and biographer known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft. Early life Tomalin was born Claire Delavenay on 20 June 1933 in London, the daughter of English composer Muriel Herbert and French academic Émile Delavenay. Education Tomalin was educated at Hitchin Girls' Grammar School, a former state grammar school in Hitchin in Hertfordshire, at Dartington Hall School, a former boarding-school in Devon, and at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. Career In 1974 she published her first book The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread Book Award. Since then she has published: Shelley and His World (1980) Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987) The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990) NCR Book Award, Hawthornden, James Tait Black Prize. Now a film Mrs Jordan's Profession (1994) Jane Austen: A Life (1997) Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002) Whitbread biography and Book of the Year prizes, Pepys Society Prize, Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), followed by a television film about Hardy, and published a collection of Hardy's poems. Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World (2021) She also edited and introduced Mary Shelley's story for children, Maurice. A collection of her reviews, Several Strangers, appeared in 1999. Tomalin organised two exhibitions about the Regency actress Mrs Jordan at Kenwood House in 1995, and about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in 1997. In 2004 she unveiled a blue plaque for Mary Wollstonecraft at 45 Dolben Street, Southwark, where Wollstonecraft lived from 1788. She has served on the Committee of the London Library, and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society. Personal life Tomalin married her first husband, fellow Cambridge graduate Nicholas Tomalin, a journalist, in 1955, and they had three daughters and two sons. He was killed while reporting on the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973. She worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then The Sunday Times, while bringing up her children. She married the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn in 1993. They live in Petersham, London. Awards and honours James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Invisible Woman (1990) Hawthornden Prize, The Invisible Woman (1991) Whitbread Book Award, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002) Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2003) Samuel Pepys Award of the Samuel Pepys Club, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2003) Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlist, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2003) Honorary Member Magdalene College, Cambridge (2003) Honorary Fellow Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge (2003), Newnham College; Cambridge (2004) Honorary D.Litt: UEA (2005); Birmingham (2005); Greenwich (2006); Cambridge (2007); Goldsmith (2009); Open University (2008); Roehampton (2011); Portsmouth (2012) Costa Book Awards (Biography), shortlist, Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) Biographers International Organization Annual Award (2016) Bodley Medal (2018) Works The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World (New York, Penguin Books, 2021) (ISBN 978-1-984-87902-8) A Life of My Own (London, Penguin Books, 2017) (ISBN 978-0-241-23995-7). Autobiography. Charles Dickens: A Life (New York, Penguin Books, 2011) (ISBN 0-14-103693-1). Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (New York, Penguin Press, 2007) (ISBN 978-1-594-20118-9). Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) (ISBN 0-670-88568-1 or 0-14-028234-3). Jane Austen: A Life (Vintage eBooks, 2000) (ISBN 0-14-029690-5) Several Strangers; writing from three decades (London, Viking Books, 1999) (ISBN 0-670-88567-3); (New York, Penguin, 2000) (ISBN 0-14-190950-1). Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London, Viking, 1987), 1998 (ISBN 0-14-011715-6). Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King, 1995 (ISBN 0-14-015923-1). The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (London, Viking, 1990) (New York, Knopf, 1991) (ISBN 0-14-012136-6). Shelley and His World (London, Thames and Hudson, 1980) (ISBN 0-500-13068-X); (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980) (ISBN 0-68-416620-8). The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 1992 (ISBN 0-14-016761-7). References Further reading "Aida Edemariam meets Claire Tomalin", The Guardian, 18 November 2006 "Claire Tomalin: a Life in Words", BBC News, 29 January 2003 Gardner, Anthony (2003). "An encounter with the acclaimed biographer of Samuel Pepys", from The Telegraph Magazine Wood, Gaby (26 January 2003). "The Observer Profile: Claire Tomalin", The Observer. External links Claire Tomalin at IMDb Claire Tomalin at British Council Literature Appearances on C-SPAN. Discover the Claire Tomalin popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Claire Tomalin books.
Best Seller Claire Tomalin Books of 2024
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Among You Taking Notes...
Naomi Mitchison'As in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are instantly recognisable and as fresh and immediate today as they were then' GUARDIAN'She writes vividly and movingl...
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Eric Gill
Fiona MacCarthyA gorgeous new edition of Fiona MacCarthy's groundbreaking biography of the artistcraftsman, typographer, and lettercutter, master woodengraver, and sculptor: Eric Gill.'Fascinatin...
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Demolition
Neil RollinsonWith the frank, subversive, and very funny poems in his first two books, Neil Rollinson established himself as a deft cartographer of the sensual world. While a rich and tactile er...
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Kraftwerk
Tim BarrThe future of modern music began in Dusseldorf in 1970, when an avantgarde German band, the Organisation reinvented themselves as Kraftwerk and set in motion a train of events whic...
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Richard II
William Shakespeare & Stanley Wells'Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king'Richard, a vain, despotic ruler, listens only to his flatterers. When his cousin Bolingbroke, p...
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London
Charles Dickens‘Wealth and beggary, virtue and vice, repletion and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding together’Could any writer portray London better than Charles Dickens?...
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All Sorts of Lives
Claire HarmanThe Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023 A Waterstones Best Book of 2023'All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's l...
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The Chameleon Poet
Robert FraserThe poet George Barker was convinced that his biography could never be written. 'I've stirred the facts around too much,' he told Robert Fraser. 'It simply can't be done.' Eliot w...
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Greek Tragedy
Aeschylus, Euripides & SophoclesAgememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestr...
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Sacred Cows
Fay WeldonIn 1989, after the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Fay Weldon published Sacred Cows, a pamphlet critical of the fundament...
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Selected Letters
Madame SevigneOne of the world's greatest correspondents, Madame de Sévigné (162696) paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of France at the time of Louis XIV, in eloquent letters written throu...
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The Hitopadesa
M NarayanaComposed between 800 and 950 AD, Narayana's Hitopadesa is one of the bestknown of all works in Sanskrit literature. A fascinating collection of fables, maxims and sayings in verse,...
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Trollope
Victoria GlendinningVictoria Glendinning provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother. But it is Anthony as a husband a...
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The Duff Cooper Diaries
John Julius NorwichThe long awaited and highly revealing diaries of the politician, diplomat, and socialite (married to Lady Diana Cooper)'This is a fabulous, jawdropping read' SUNDAY TIMES'Duff Coop...
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The Auden Generation
Samuel HynesThis is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time pas...
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Comrades
Rosita Boland'I was fascinated, moved and entertained by every page. This is the kind of book the world needs right now' DONAL RYAN'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are:A clos...
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Unruly Times
A S ByattUnruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that sha...
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Samuel Pepys
Claire TomalinFor a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history...
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Wicked Words
Various ArtistsWicked Words a collection of saucy and compelling short storiesOutrageously sexy and deliciously decadent, Wicked Words short stories are the best in contemporary sexy fiction. T...
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Flesh in the Age of Reason
Roy Porter'As an introduction to early modern thinking and the impact of past ideas on present lives, this book can find few equals and no superiors. Porter is a witty, humane writer with an...
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Three-a-Penny
Lucy MallesonA rediscovered classic memoir a fascinating insight into the life of a crime writer during and after the First World War a woman ahead of her time.With a new introduction by Soph...
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The Horror of Love
Lisa HiltonThe compelling love story of two extraordinary individuals Nancy Mitford and Free French commander Gaston Palewski living in extraordinary times immortalised in THE PURSUIT OF L...
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Frogs and Other Plays
AristophanesThe master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In The Frogs, written during the Peloponn...
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Petrarch in English
Thomas RocheFranceso Petrarch (13041374), creator of the sonnet form, remained for more than three hundred years the most influential poet in Europe, his works more widely read than even those...
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My Childhood
Maxim GorkyColoured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev the life of the ordinary Russian. After his ...
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The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens & Mark Wormald'One of my life's greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers I can't go back and read it for the first time' Fernando PessoaFew first novels have created as much p...
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The Secret History
Procopius, Peter Sarris & G. WilliamsonA trusted member of the Byzantine establishment, Procopius was the Empire's official chronicler, and his History of the Wars of Justinian proclaimed the strength and wisdom of the ...
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Making a Noise
John TusaJohn Tusa is a distinguished journalist, broadcaster and leader of arts organisations, best remembered for his times at the BBC, including creating Newsnight.Tusa's memoir is etche...
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Hatchepsut
Joyce TyldesleyQueen or, as she would prefer to be remembered King Hatchepsut was an astonishing woman. Brilliantly defying tradition she became the female embodiment of a male role, dressing i...
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Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen'Jane Austen is a genius, and Northanger Abbey is hugely underrated' Martin AmisWith its irrepressible heroine and playful literary games, Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and...