Within these intensely odd domestic spheres, Collins constructs paranoid personal relationships through which secrets are obssessively concealed, told or discovered. William M Clarke's revised edition of The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins juxtaposes the writer's unconventional domesticities with those staged within his fiction. The novels are rich with eccentric households: in The Woman in White (1859) Collins assembles a fraudulent aristocrat, an obese, mouse-fancying Italian count and a moustached lady under one roof; The Law and the Lady (1875) offers a disconcerting relationship between a cross-dressed female servant and the legless Miserrimus Dexter (who, when not leaping about on his hands, is careering around in his wheelchair claiming to be Napoleon); Poor Miss Finch (1872) features the widow of a South American republican, a blind heroine, a brutish German oculist and a pair of identical twins, one of whom has turned himself blue by drinking silver nitrate. Behind closed suburban doors, scenes of the bizarre, the painful and criminal are played out in "the secret theatre of home". Instead of the crumbling castle, Collins's characters suffer their dark anxieties in the modern housing development, facing horrors in anonymous new buildings that sometimes turn out to be private lunatic asylums or vivisectories. Such scenarios were the source of the nervous sensations that his novels famously engendered in their contemporary readers, apprehensive pleasures that some commentators believed to be "unfitting the public for the prosaic actions of Life". Like some literary Nimrod, Wilkie Collins brought the mysterious terrors of the Italianate Gothic down from the Alps and into the the drawing rooms and back kitchens of Victorian England.

Because we come to trust him almost as soon as we open the book we read of Gilbert and George's more extreme exhibitions or of Warhol or Twombly and see that there are more ways of seeing than we know.! 'About Modern Art' by David Sylvester is published by Chatto & Windus at pounds 25. There is some toothsome art-critical cattiness evident in the short prologues to the essays, and, once or twice, in them: "To praise [Richard Long] now is to take a food parcel to someone who is in the middle of eating his dinner at the Ritz." (The thorn may perhaps be retracted by the comparison Sylvester makes between Long and Caspar David Friedrich.)The different colours of black in Spanish art, the "heroism of the real in Cezanne and Poussin", the art criticism of Adrian Stokes, the unanimous affirmation of Jewish painters that "art has no business to exist if it does not speak to the onlooker of the miseries and occasionally the triumphs of human existence", the slippage of Pop into Zen, the truth about Bonnard's Marthe and her baths, Mondrian's artificial tulip, each is given its proper weight and attention. "Every clown wants to play Hamlet, no Hamlet would prefer to be a clown"; Miro "feigns a superb spontaneity"; the art of the "wine culture" (Europe) versus that of the "Coke culture" (America); "For a woman, the horror of ageing resides in no longer attracting; for a man, in no longer acting". The beautiful poise of Sylvester's consideration lies in that subtly undermining yet Englishly decent adjective. No page is without at least two such felicities, and the collection is stuffed with aphorisms that are neither stiff nor apt to come to bits when you think about them. In this it only follows the principle that the more one knows the less one tends to do.This wide lucidity coexists with an intimate understanding of the small (the "all-overness" of Klee) and even the parochial - "It seems to be the misfortune of British painters to be born with more in them of Shelley than of Keats" - the "reasonableness" that distinguishes Moore from Picasso.