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  Culture | Charles Dickens An extravagant imagination Save Share Sep 10th 2009 | | 3 min read Getty Images An unfathomable mystery Charles Dickens . By Michael Slater. Yale University Press; 720 pages; $35 and £25 . Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk OVER dinner once an American friend quizzed Charles Dickens about the workings of his imagination. Where on earth did those wonderful characters come from? “What an unfathomable mystery there is in it all!” replied the creator of Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Pip, Pickwick and the rest. Raising a wine glass, he continued: “Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, and becomes instinct with life.” Scholars have pondered this mystery for well over a century. Michael Slater's biography begins with tw...

  Photograph: Alamy Sep 3rd 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story T he question was simple, but it still took her by surprise. A well-dressed young man stood up at one of her talks and asked, “Do you have a signature song?” Before she could answer, the whole audience, young and old, burst out in chorus. “A great river flows, wide are its waves,/Wind blows the scent of rice blossoms to both shores...” And Guo Lanying rocked with laughter. That song, “My Motherland”, was indeed her signature. Both melody and words were in the simple folksong style she loved. She had sung it most famously in “Shangganling”, a film of 1956 about a recent battle of the Korean war, sitting demure and radiant in military uniform in a cave full of battered soldiers who, group by group, joined in with her. China was indeed beautiful, its roads broad and its waters full of white sails. But “In order to usher in a new era/They’ve woken the sleeping mountains/And changed the shapes of the rivers.” Revolution...