My favourite passage from Dickens…

I have never been more chilled, thrilled, shocked and excited — and from a literary point of view, nothing has made me feel more inadequate as a writer — than when reading the opening to Great Expectations, which is one of the finest passages I’ve ever come across. Screen adaptations can’t quite capture the atmosphere because the writing frees the imagination; it’s terribly difficult to do, and you often lose the beauty of the words. That is the passage for me.

Saul David is a military historian of Victorian Britain

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The entrance of Magwitch

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.