Philip Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham City University where he was for several years Head of the School of English, and is currently Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities at Bristol University where he teaches on the part-time evening degree in English Literature and Community Engagement. He has written extensively on eighteenth-century poetry and literary criticism, and has co-edited for Oxford University Press the critical and cultural manuscripts of the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood. Alongside articles and essays on aesthetic and theoretical subjects, Smallwood is the author of a study of Alexander Pope (2003) and the prize-winning monograph Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment (2004). His Critical Occasions: Dryden, Pope, Johnson and the History of Criticism appeared in 2011, while his present project, a hybrid volume devoted to satirical attacks on critics and criticism in the eighteenth century, is entitled Ridiculous Critics: Eighteenth-Century Writing and the Mockery of Judgment.