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“... working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public’. It was something of a misnomer since the public was well enough known. It was their ‘entertaining literature’ that was the mystery. English society put such a moral premium on ...”

“... the literary theory section of the local bookshop from the soft porn shelves, sort out the latest Jackie Collins from the later Roland Barthes. Many an eager masturbator must have borne away some sexy-looking tome only to find himself reading up on the floating signifier. Sexuality began in the late Sixties, as an extension of radical politics into ...”

“... the subtitle might regrettably have carried. The reduction of Anna Ford to the thinking man’s Jackie Collins is complete. This is to state an undoubted unfairness to the intentions of the author, in the presentation of her book. On Ms Ford’s account, its germ is her undergraduate study of social anthropology. There is a fair show of primary ...”

“... learns about Grey’s ‘dark side’ and his ‘rules’; and so on. The plots of Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Dan Brown, Sylvia Day, Danielle Steel, Lee Child and James Patterson all, apparently, have a similar shape, and the curve of The Da Vinci Code is identical in its measuring out of highs and lows until the very end of the novel: Dan Brown ...”

“... to a jumble sale to buy books only to discover that everything that wasn’t a copy of Jaws was by Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, or Danielle Steel. I noted this cultural deficit in my compendium of things to complain about to God but I read The Bitch myself on the way home and remember a very fruity passage in which the heroine, a woman ...”

“... Southern California acquire the Empyrean hues with which they shimmer in the English mind today. Jackie Collins’s new novel, Hollywood Husbands, continues her maniacal Frankensteinian attempt to effect the imaginative transfer of the American base to a British brain. As in much of Ms Collins’s writing, there’s a ...”

“... Krantz, Jean Auel, Danielle Steel, Jilly Cooper, Mary Higgins Clark, V.C. Andrews, Shirley Conran, Jackie Briskin, Rosemary Rogers. All these names have figured in recent best-seller lists, lists which are dominated by women novelists of no apparent interest to the Companion. It is instructive to look at what surrounds the areas where these best-selling women ...”

“... lover through to single mum, Madonna (blue-mantle variety rather than blue-velvet), whore, Jackie Collins/Shirley Conran, power-dressed overachieving brain surgeon: she samples the splendours and the miseries of a present-day courtesan, for the Eve of today still cannot find an identity apart from Adam. This is She-Devil territory, and Weldon has ...”

“... a ‘real outlandish creature’. The ultimate shiksa who haunted every Jewish boy’s dreams. Jackie Collins would blush to have written this. Spitz’s lowlife style would matter less if he had any knowledge of, or interest in, Dylan’s work. Not much is to be learned from sentences like this: ‘For Bobby, the discovery of rock’n’roll was a ...”

“... Eurotrash of the 19th century read as if the Almanach de Gotha had been adapted for television by Jackie Collins. Many more sections read like a medical dictionary. Starting with Wilhelm’s coraco brachialis and pectoralis major, the operation on his sternocleidomastoid muscle, and subsequent problems with torticollis and cholesteatoma of the middle ...”

“... inversion, at least to my eye: you’d think the book belonged to the titillatory tradition of a Jackie Collins expose of the rich and famous. The final irony would be a Hollywood movie based on the book which made lots of money by treating money as the fetish Money condemns it for being. As the novel itself suggests, money has this uncanny way of ...”

“... short skirts and too much lip gloss, has a slag-tag tattoo and ‘teeth that went in’, reads Jackie Collins, watches American Idol and flips out over five dollars’ worth of change. At the other end of the scale, the Barbours are too rich to have a properly connoisseurial attitude to their fine furniture and irreproachable outfits; excessive ...”

“... of a protracted infatuation or love affair with a young man called Charles Thurstan Edward-Collins (the possessor of the ‘grey feminine eyes’). Louis returned to Marlborough to visit after he left for Oxford. (‘I told Charles I wasn’t coming to M.C. any more but I expect I shall. The College is so sordid … Still it is worth it. Don’t you ...”

“... first appeared circa 1957 and became attached to the Beatles around 1963.)In Marcus Collins’s The Beatles and Sixties Britain, Burgess is one of a long list of mainstream commentators (variously Grub or Fleet Street, middlebrow or mandarin) whose reaction to the Beatles was somewhere between a fit of the vapours and fear of imminent ...”