A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

blimey, he does go on a bit, doesn't he?  But a great story.  The two "good" characters are both vapid ciphers, but so what.  We have Madame Defarge, we have the abuse of alcohol, we have the French Revolution, with the Terror writ clear, and we find out what it was like to travel in a post-coach in the eighteenth century.  And the bitch-fight between the two strong women, towards the end, is hard to beat.  I loved the bits of back-story, such as that Madame Defarge was from the "fisher-folk" in the west of France, and walked "barefoot on the brown sea-sand" as a girl.  "A far, far better thing", etc etc - I had forgotten that n the book Sydney Carton does not actually say those words - they are written down as something he might have said, had he lived long enough to write them down.  Hmmm...