Wilkie CollinsBy: Peter Ackroyd Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, the sweetest tempered of all the Victorian novelists, from his childhood