As well as buying Possession, I also purchased The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes with my birthday vouchers. This has proved to be extremely entertaining, much more so than when I was a teenager, when many of the quirks and theatricalities of Holmes's personality and Conan-Doyle's style were lost on me. The titles themselves are classic: The Adventure of The Man with the Twisted Lip, for example, and the prose is great. The Victorian element is wonderful, obviously missing from the new up-to-date T.V. dramatisations but some of the detail has passed into the modernisation really well. Sherlock's long thin legs toasting by the fire, his haughty self-regard, obsessive nature, fierce concentration and manic mood swings, for instance. Reading Holmes has prompted me to re-look at a book I bought about five years ago but never got around to reading, Arthur and George , by Julian Barnes, which is partly based on the life of Conan-Doyle.
