This miscellany explores the fascinating and enigmatic world of Sherlock Holmes, his place in literary history and how he has become the iconic, timeless character who is loved by millions. Contains facts, trivia and quotes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary stories, the reader can also explore the often weird and wonderful characters who graced Conan Doyle's pages. Do you know the difference between a Penang Lawyer and a Tide-Waiter? And if you think a 'life preserver' is a cork-filled flotation device, how does Wilson Kemp fit one into the sleeve of his jacket? The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany is light-hearted and highly informative, and perfect for both the Sherlock aficionado and those new to the world of 221B Baker Street.

Exploring the fascinating and enigmatic world of Sherlock Holmes, this miscellany examines his place in literary history, his popularity, and how he has become the iconic, timeless character who is loved by millions.

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us. “How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment. “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself. At that first sight of Watson, Sherlock Holmes made brilliant deductions. But even he couldn’t know that their meeting was inaugurating a friendship that would make himself and the good Doctor cultural icons, as popular as ever more than a century after their 1887 debut. Through four novels and fifty-six stories, Arthur Conan Doyle led the pair through dramatic adventures that continue to thrill readers today, offering an unmatched combination of skillful plotting, period detail, humor, and distinctive characters. For a Holmes fan, there are few pleasures comparable to returning to his richly imagined world—the gaslit streets of Victorian London, the companionable clutter of 221B Baker Street, the reliable fuddlement (and nerves of steel) of Watson, the perverse genius of Holmes himself. It’s all there in The Daily Sherlock Holmes, the perfect bedside companion for fans of the world’s only consulting detective. Within these pages readers will find a quotation for every day of the year, drawn from across the Conan Doyle canon. Beloved characters and familiar lines recall favorite stories and scenes, while other passages remind us that Conan Doyle had a way with description and a ready wit. Moriarty and Mycroft, Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson; the Hound, the Red-Headed League, the Speckled Band, and the dread Reichenbach Falls—it’s all here, anchored, of course, in that unforgettable duo of Holmes and Watson. No book published this year will bring a Holmes fan more pleasure. Come, readers. The game is afoot.

‘There can be no question, Mr Dear Watson, of the value of exercise before breakfast’ Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of Black Peter You may have been introduced to the magic of the greatest of English detectives by reading the books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or perhaps watching some of the hundreds of films or TV shows that feature the extraordinary adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson - now, this unique book offers a detailed itinerary for actually ‘walking’ Sherlock Holmes. Beginning, of course, at Baker Street a series of walks takes in the well-known, as well as some of the more obscure, locations of London as travelled by Holmes and Watson and a gallery of unforgettable characters in the stories. Details of each location and the story in which it features are given along with other items of interest - associated literary and historical information, social history, and events in Conan Doyle’s life. A chapter then explores Holmes’ adventures in the rest of the UK. 55 black and white original photographs accompany the text. This book is designed to appeal to anyone who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the stories by travelling, even if just in imagination from an armchair, exactly the same London streets as Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps also by exploring some iconic Holmesian locations farther afield. ‘Come, Watson, come!’ Holmes says in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange. ‘The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!’

This miscellany explores the staggeringly busy and diverse life of Charles Dickens, giving readers the chance to get to know the man through his work and its major themes. With carefully chosen quotations from the novels, but also from his sketches and journalism, discover what Dickens had to say about the big issues like crime, the family, education and money. Meet here, too, those wonderful characters that have been handed down to us like the real figures of history – Mr Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield and many more. So what is it that made Dickens special? This miscellany offers an insight into all the mad humour, passionate indignation, moral conviction, plain good sense and sheer unstoppable energy that made up one of the very greatest of English writers.

How many planets has the TARDIS visited? Can you name the Doctor’s favorite Gallifreyan bedtime stories? What’s the best way to defeat a Sontaran? Put your Time Lord knowledge to the test with an extraordinary journey through fifty-five years of Doctor Who. Now fully updated to take in the Twelfth Doctor’s final episode, this unique tour of space and time is packed with facts, figures, and stories from the show’s entire run. Peek inside the inner workings of the TARDIS, trace the Doctor’s family tree, and learn how to defeat his most fearsome enemies. I imagine you have many questions. Fire away. I might answer some of them…

Sherlock Holmes: The Hero With a Thousand Faces ambitiously takes on the task of explaining the continued popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective over the course of three centuries. In plays, films, TV shows, and other media, one generation after another has reimagined Holmes as a romantic hero, action hero, gentleman hero, recovering drug addict, weeping social crusader, high-functioning sociopath, and so on. In essence, Sherlock Holmes has become the blank slate upon which we write the heroic formula that best suits our time and place. Volume One looks at the social and cultural environment in which Sherlock Holmes came to fame. Victorian novelists like Anthony Trollope and William Thackeray had pointedly written "novels without a hero," because in their minds any well-ordered and well-mannered society would have no need for heroes or heroic behavior. Unfortunately, this was at odds with a reality in which criminals like Jack the Ripper stalked the streets and people didn't trust the police, who were generally regarded as corrupt and incompetent. Into this gap stepped the world's first consulting detective, an amateur reasoner of some repute by the name of Sherlock Holmes, who shot to fame in the pages of The Strand Magazine in 1891. When Conan Doyle proceeded to kill Holmes off in 1893, it was American playwright, director, and actor William Gillette who brought the character back to life in his 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, creating a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with his romantic version of Holmes, and cementing his place as the definitive Sherlock Holmes until the late 1930s. By that point, Sherlock Holmes had developed a cult following who facetiously maintained that Holmes was a real person, formed clubs like The Baker Street Irregulars, and introduced the idea of cosplay to the embryonic world of fandom. These well-educated fanboys subsequently became the self-assigned protectors of Sherlock Holmes, anxious that their version of the character not be besmirched or defamed in any way. In spite of this, there was considerable besmirching and defaming to be seen in the early silent films featuring Sherlock Holmes, which effectively turned him into an action hero due to the lack of sound. When sound films took the industry by storm in the late 1920s, there were a numbers of pretenders who reached for the Sherlock Holmes crown, including Clive Brook, Reginald Owen, and Raymond Massey, but it took more than a decade before a new definitive Sherlock Holmes would be crowned in 1939 in the person of Basil Rathbone.

This book examines the processes of adaptation across a number of intriguing case studies and media. Turning its attention from the 'what' to the 'how' of adaptation, it serves to re-situate the discourse of adaptation studies, moving away from the hypotheses that used to haunt it, such as fidelity, to questions of how texts, authors and other creative practitioners (always understood as a plurality) engage in dialogue with one another across cultures, media, languages, genders and time itself. With fifteen chapters across fields including fine art and theory, drama and theatre, and television, this interdisciplinary volume considers adaptation across the creative and performance arts, with a single focus on the collaborative.

This book investigates the development of Sherlock Holmes adaptations in British theatre since the turn of the millennium. Sherlock Holmes has become a cultural phenomenon all over again in the twenty-first century, as a result of the television series Sherlock and Elementary, and films like Mr Holmes and the Guy Ritchie franchise starring Robert Downey Jr. In the light of these new interpretations, British theatre has produced timely and topical responses to developments in the screen Sherlocks’ stories. Moreover, stage Sherlocks of the last three decades have often anticipated the knowing, metafictional tropes employed by screen adaptations. This study traces the recent history of Sherlock Holmes in the theatre, about which very little has been written for an academic readership. It argues that the world of Sherlock Holmes is conveyed in theatre by a variety of games that activate new modes of audience engagement.