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“... The watchers were even within their community. Ross in his apartment, and Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in a house that they actually bought in order to write a book about the town. Both parties were open about their intentions and both invested a year of their lives, and in Frantz and Collins’s case a ...”

“... which blurred the edges very nicely. It was in these improper fantasies that the novelist Wilkie Collins found his raw materials. In his world, the tags are always falling off the luggage. The narrator of Basil (1852) has been ‘obliged in honour to resign’ his surname, because his father has literally torn his page out of the family history. In The Woman ...”

“... 14 Catholics in the Millfield district of Belfast after a constable was shot. Although Michael Collins brought these killings to the attention of Winston Churchill during the London negotiations, Nixon was never arrested or charged. He became an embarrassment only when Sir James Craig and the Unionist hierarchy got involved with the Governments of the ...”

“... come over here a minute and sit down.’ I also liked the ladies who were having a cackle at Joan Collins: ‘Did you see her, at that Jubilee thing, trying to do a curtsey in those heels.’ The stimulus was an appalling poison-pink and ruffled Emanuel monstrosity, worn by Collins in 1983. What did she think she was ...”

“... idylls with which his novels so often conclude. Dickens’s wife wasn’t part of it, for a start. Catherine had been pensioned off, following the messy separation of 1858, and was living near Regent’s Park with their eldest son Charley. In a letter to Miss Burdett Coutts – a friend to both parties – Dickens unforgivingly vetoes the reconciliation she ...”

“... exiles until at last we are quite alone.’ In ‘My Sister Cherish’ the Grenadian writer Merle Collins describes the death of the youngest of the family, hydrocephalous since birth, much loved. The tragedy is not so much that Cherish died as that she had to die in hospital. And from Louisa May Alcott, Mackay has made the courageous choice of Beth’s last ...”

“... and Matthew Kneale slipped to seventh place, behind Anita Shreve, Jack Higgins, Paul Eddy and Catherine Cookson, without sales falling off too dramatically, as a respectable 1366 units of English Passengers left the shelves. Perhaps in future paperbacks should think twice before proclaiming themselves ‘The No.1 Bestseller’: ‘Second only to ...”

“... available men; but at the same time Defoe uses her dangerous secret dress – in the way Wilkie Collins used his woman in white’s dress – as a troubling sign of irrational forces at work. During the 18th and 19th centuries, novelists began to use dress to evoke the inner life of characters, and to show the unconscious ways clothes affect wearer and ...”

“... his marriage, but when he came to force the separation he put all the blame on his wife, accusing Catherine in private and public of not being fit for her role, of laziness and lassitude, ‘weakness and jealousy’, of not caring for the children, whom she ‘was glad to be rid of’. She was not worthy of him or them. She doesn’t even have the nous to ...”

“... the way real life has been vacuumed into the fantasy. In Dynasty Alexis’s daughter is played by Catherine Oxenberg, the daughter of Princess Elisabeth of Yugoslavia. In the last episode this bona fide royal married the Prince of Moldavia – though the Baltic state had been cleansed of its Communist occupants to look like Monaco, or Portofino. Former ...”

“... drafted the deed of separation between the Dickenses after 21 years of marriage, which banished Catherine Hogarth Dickens from the family home, but he loved his friend too much to write more than a few sentences about it. Dickens’s mistress, Nelly Ternan, appears only as the first beneficiary in Dickens’s will, which is included in an appendix. Where ...”

“... than anyone else in Austen’s world (24.58 incidences per 1000 words), and the egocentric Lady Catherine de Burgh of Pride and Prejudice less than anyone else (2.13 per 1000 words). Equally, we know how utterly opposed in behaviour are the conforming Mr Collins and the wayward Lydia Bennet, but it takes a neat diagram ...”

“... like a good child, he chalks onto the great guns of the battery given names: ‘The Reverend Collins’, ‘General Tilney’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’. Something in the image hints at the mingling of pastoral and violence, of passion and illiteracy which can go to make up both human bonding and human ...”

“... extended, naturally enough, to women, and fastened upon the sister of some college friends, Catherine Disney. She loved him too – but before the mutual affinity became evident to them both, she allowed herself to be married to another man to whom she had already given her promise. He was only 20, but he never quite got over it. He worshipped the image ...”

“... ways in which we try to understand others. In a different kind of novel we might find out why Mr Collins is as he is, but in Pride and Prejudice it is enough accurately to trace his unique combination of servility and self-importance. Caricature can be sharp perception of a true pattern of behaviour. In Pride and Prejudice, as Woloch notes, ‘Elizabeth can ...”