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“... Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is no evidence of unhappiness. The other child to marry at this time was Katie. Her choice of Wilkie Collins’s younger brother was more acceptable, and Dickens presided genially enough over the pastoral festivities: ‘the people of the village strewed flowers in the churchyard, and erected triumphal arches, and fired guns.’ It was ‘a great ...”

“... less about 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 ...”

“... that if only the guilty – bloodied – nightdress could be found, the case would be solved. Wilkie Collins borrowed this clue for The Moonstone, though he turned it from a bloody garment to one splattered with fresh paint. Because of the breast flannel and the nightdress, every woman at Road Hill House had to account for her undergarments. The ...”

“... the last decade there have been four authoritative biographies of Trollope; two of Dickens; two of Wilkie Collins; three of Stevenson (one down, two to come); and – with the present centennial haul – three of Tennyson. Given the huge expenditure of scholarly energy modern biography demands it would be rational to redistribute some of it. One would ...”

“... of readers hungry for a return to the narrative and moral certainties of Dickens, Eliot and Collins. Deservedly, this unusual and ambitious book – 12 years, we are told, in the researching and writing – became an international bestseller. Somewhere along the way, however, Palliser seems to have become dissatisfied with the way his novel was being ...”

“... precocious and eclectic reader’ of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Wilkie Collins, but modelled her first literary efforts ‘chiefly upon Jane Eyre’ and believed that Charlotte Brontë was the most passionate Victorian novelist. Braddon also enjoyed the popular fiction in penny magazines and was a ‘genuine ...”

“... of the Erebus and the Terror by Turner, and a melodrama called The Frozen Deep, written by Wilkie Collins and produced by Dickens, with ‘authentic’ Arctic costumes for the explorers, and paper snow shredded and scattered onto the stage from above by ‘snowboys’. Between 1847 and 1859, more than thirty expeditions were despatched in search ...”

“... Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in white, or Lewis Carroll’s little girl lost in a ...”

“... at the Manchester Academy of Fine Art, which meant they had less chance to sell their work. Wilkie Collins described the taste and enthusiasms of the self-made industrialists of the mid-19th century: they wanted paintings, he said, with ‘interesting subjects, variety, resemblance to nature, genuineness of the article, and fresh paint’. So there ...”

“... British press in 1857. Fire-eaters like Charles Dickens approved heartily; his friend and disciple Wilkie Collins was appalled. And Flashy? He’s just a soldier who’s seen it all and has no illusions. Thomas Hughes dedicated his novel to ‘the great army of Browns who are scattered all over the whole Empire on which the sun never sets’. Fraser ...”

“... the crafted symmetries of the book’s construction, but – as Trollope complained when reading Wilkie Collins – it’s difficult to lose the taste of the construction. Motivation is too exactly tailored to produce the results required by the plot; the very proficiency with which the characters function in what is admittedly an effortless read makes ...”

“... His detective work, at first jocular and unamazed – ‘Good grief, sounds like something Wilkie Collins might have put on in his drawing room’ – takes him dangerously close to the sources of his trauma, finally implicating him in a murder that looks like satanic ritual. With a prissily Conradian ‘Horrible. Absolutely horrible,’ the diary ...”

“... and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Wilkie Collins uses the withheld information of a back view to preface a revelation. A painter can’t do that. In pictures the effect is more often to make you wonder, not how a person looks, but what they think about the view that you and they ...”