“... the Immortality Ode. The treatment of Coleridge is more persuasive and benefits from the work of Thomas MacFarland. Coleridge also wrote a lot but he was certainly blocked. Biographia Literaria is an almost comic instance of the desperate – and successful – tactics he would adopt to avoid writing what he thought it was his duty to write. It could also ...”

“... expand: Millais, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Monckton Milnes, Ruskin, Katie Collins, Arthur Munby, George Eliot, the Carlyles, Henry Cole. Some of these, like the Carlyles, were handed down from the old days, sanctified with the reflected glamour of the past. Anny was fond of Jane Carlyle, but sometimes lost patience with ...”

“... esteemed one of the most beautiful as well as the most ferocious of animals?’ to which Lady Collins replies with a verbatim recital of Conran’s letter. The story was also related in The Third Chapter of Accidents and Remarkable Events Containing Caution and Instruction for Children (1801); Scenes in Asia for the Amusement and Instruction of Little ...”

“... Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is ...”

“... Bismarck or Hitler, but no fewer than three Anglo-Saxon historians have tried their hand recently. Thomas Kohut gave us Wilhelm II and the Germans in 1991; Lamar Cecil needed two books to capture the life, the second published in 1996. Now comes John Röhl, with the first of three projected volumes. Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious ...”

“... into a fire burning in a hole in the ground (a method recommended by the sorely-tried slaver, Thomas Phelps, on the Barbary coast). The affected part could be scourged with a whip of nettles or painted with caustic; or tiny bonfires of moss could be started in strategic parts to drive the pain elsewhere. As an alleviating drug, colchicum enjoyed a long ...”

“... thrived. In 1960, however, a now financially shaky Heinemann and its satellites were acquired by Thomas Tilling, an industrial group with a main interest in construction. They were not, however, interventionist owners and the publishing activities went on much as before, although by the early 1970s Warburg had retired and Secker’s was managed (very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which had never been printed before, quite apart from an authorised ...”

“... was written, in the space of one year, by the same firm of packagers which has also produced the Collins English Dictionary. An American version of it appeared as the Random House Encyclopedia. It is to be distinguished from the Macmillan Family Encyclopedia in 21 volumes, costing £475, to which Macmillan gave its name only four years ago and which was ...”

“... is done with accuracy and evident enjoyment (if the two junk-dealers are not really called ‘Collins and McCabe’ and ‘Hewison’, the reader can enjoy a good concealed joke). But Wright is arguing that ‘London has become Dalston Lane writ large’; that from this sample of decay and neglect a wider future can be read – not all of it dark. ‘As ...”

“... of music were the big personality jocks of American radio in the 1940s and 1950s, men like Jazzbo Collins and Alan Freed, who wielded huge power over trends, sales and the hit parade. Freed has been widely credited for popularising rock’n’roll. Or, as Poschardt puts it: ‘Rock’n’roll began with a DJ, and pop music began with rock’n’roll.’ Since ...”

“... the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], ...”

“... Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood (I think) and to Wilkie Collins. The effect is like an unseen examination for Joint Honours in English Art and Literature, except that while Ackroyd trusts the ‘scholarly reader’ to recognise the literary gobbets, he slips him a crib to the slide-test. There are no doubt many more ...”

“... will but it’s not straightforward; with Barbellion nothing ever is. The would-be publishers, Collins, belatedly ask to be relieved of their undertaking, for fear ‘of the injury to the firm’s reputation as publishers of school-books and bibles’. Chatto & Windus step in but demand cuts (‘The publishers rejected two splendid entries about ...”