“... illegitimate. He was opposed to political violence, though he dined with the IRA leader Michael Collins three days before his death in an ambush. He also spoke alongside the revolutionary James Connolly in the Albert Hall in 1913, when he insisted that citizens engaged in political protest should form their own force to defend themselves against police ...”

“... the revolutionary possibilities of bawdy talk.Informed by black feminist thinkers such as Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Patricia Hill Collins, Sowande’ Mustakeem and Kimberlé Crenshaw, as well as by feminist scholarship more broadly, Harris examines the susceptibility of particular individuals to sexual violence in ...”

“... new sexual type had in fact taken place forty years earlier when, in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins offset his pretty, insipid, helpless heroine by a second heroine who was none of these things: the great Marian Halcombe, whose charm subdued not only the equally great Count Fosco in the book but also such men of the readership as Swinburne and Edward ...”

“... poetry, he thrived at Oxford, and wrote an ‘Ode to Contemplation’ in the manner of Gray and Collins: ‘In short quick circles the shrill bat flits by,/And the slow vapour curls along the ground’ – a bad poem and one of his favourites. By the time he attends the trial of the radical William Frend in the Senate House at Cambridge, he is already so ...”

“... predictably to unmask the monstrous as the delightfully ordinary. Borrowings from Milton, Pope and Collins give some of her verse a familiar, slightly secondhand sound, as does her use of structures such as the extended simile, comparison/contrast and allegory, which are employed so frequently that they produce a comfortable predictability. If all this ...”

“... At the Netherfield ball our heroine has had to endure two clumsy turns of the floor with Mr Collins, before enjoying a dance with an unnamed officer who has conversed happily about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed ...”

“... Whether marriage really was women’s ‘pleasantest preservative from want’ (as clear-eyed Charlotte Lucas tells Lizzie Bennet before accepting the fatuous Mr Collins), for most working-class women in this era, it was their only preservative from want, full stop.This profound inequality of opportunity meant that ...”

“... minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen – poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples, Mr Collins’s ‘Collins’, the comedy of the infinitely small. It cannot have been simply a class limitation, or a limitation of experience, that intimidated his pen. It was a resolve, very American, to scrape his sacred texts ...”