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“... I Ulva Cottage Hamilton Scotland 1 January 1869 Dear Mr Andersen, My name is Anna Mary, Last-born of Mary my mother, deceased Of the desert fever while I was but a ‘wee bairn’; I am but ten, too young to remember her voice. I do like your fairy tales so much – the tin soldier and the ugly, Ugly duckling. I would like to go and visit you; When Papa comes home from Africa I intend To ask him to take me ...”

“... Can it be, as Jackie Wullschlager maintains, that in the 1840s and 1850s Hans ChristianAndersen was ‘the most famous writer in Europe’, and that ‘two centuries after his birth Andersen is still not appreciated as the world-class author that he undoubtedly was, as representative of the European Romantic spirit as Balzac or Victor Hugo’? These are grand claims and, if they’re true, we might well use this lively and informative biography to acquaint ourselves further with Andersen’s life and work ...”

“... he started putrefying. Chopin was dissected at his own request, as was King Leopold I of Belgium. Hans ChristianAndersen, convinced that foreign doctors were all charlatans, carried a card when he went abroad that said ‘I am not really dead.’ In the same will in which he established the Nobel prizes, Alfred Nobel ...”

“... in the original myth is a crane (γέρανος) not a stork. The version we know best comes from Hans ChristianAndersen. His rendering is more heavy metal than ours: a group of young storks are taunted by a cruel child, so their stork mother tells them she knows the pond ‘in which all the little babies lie, waiting ...”

“... with Howe telling ‘the children’ (who appear elliptically, in unstated relation to her) about Hans ChristianAndersen, and feeding them baguettes and apples en route to Ireland.Her latest book, The Needle’s Eye, picks up where The Winter Sun left off – with children, not in Ireland but in Uzbekistan – and ...”

“... demonstrations, had the mechanics’ institutes in a roar). And now, three famous authors. Hans ChristianAndersen’s A Visit to Germany, Italy and Malta, 1840-41 proves to be a thin travelogue, over-delicate like blanched veal. Eager to make an immortal reputation, determined to see magic and faery ...”

“... on a stepladder while ‘Irish labourers stare in through the very slates.’ A later visitor, Hans ChristianAndersen, saw a magnificent 18-room house, filled with pictures and engravings. But nothing is simply one thing, not even the reputation of a great house, and Dickens’s pile on Tavistock Square drew ire ...”

“... limited success. Even relatively minor figures declined to come. Some came but soon left, like Hans ChristianAndersen and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’. The exception was Franz Liszt, who spent thirty years in Weimar in all. He first appeared in 1841 and was soon ...”

“... is another matter. We leave him poised for a charmed flight as improbable as anything Hans ChristianAndersen might have fancied. Fairy stories make hazardous models for those who take them seriously. But we can’t quite do without them. The deliberative prose of Lewis Percy’s story holds the claims of ...”

“... raise the alarm because he knew the criminal. The reader of these opening anecdotes in Silence: A Christian History senses that MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and one of the most lucid and authoritative TV historians ever, would prefer to stand by like the original dog, a quiet and eloquent witness to the hubbub and hurly-burly ...”

“... raises 1.6 children. He has published 120 books, many of them for children; in 1997 he won the Hans ChristianAndersen Prize. He was born into a famous family of clockmakers in 1931, and raised in a suburb of Colmar, one of those idyllic medieval towns on the Rhine that seem lost to time.Like any child growing up in ...”

“... was the exclusive prerogative of genius. Art must be democratised. In 1970 he was awarded the Hans ChristianAndersen Prize, the international award for children’s writing.At the edge of a town, we read in ‘The Road to Nowhere’, among other roads leading to familiar destinations, there was one that led ...”

“... do with the real writer, at one point borrowing a metaphor from ‘The Shadow’, a short story by Hans ChristianAndersen. In the story, a man’s shadow separates from his body and takes on a life of its own, travelling around and meeting people. It occasionally comes back to visit, each time more assertive, more ...”

“... neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans ChristianAndersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.A Bishop poem (watch it closely) goes on looking long after one thinks it should have looked away – from having seen enough, from having ...”

“... was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary kook’, as a haunted-looking man who was friendly to children. One visitor to Utopia Parkway recalls seeing a little girl walking across the lawn towards Cornell. She was holding one of his boxes. ‘I’m tired of this ...”