Books like Sidetracks by Richard Holmes

> The figure in deerstalker and Inverness cape, smoking a calabash pipe and repeating "Elementary, my dear Watson," is familiar to all. Yet none of the features of this image of Sherlock Holmes are to be found in Conan Doyle, they have been introduced by artists who illustrated the stories and actors who played the part. >Some of the artistic and theatrical interpretations of Sherlock Holmes and his world were extraordinarily accurate; others were interesting misrepresentations of the original character. Here is a vivid demonstration of the great variety of imaginative ways that Sherlock Holmes has been seen in the entertainment media - films, the stage, television - and commercially - comics, cereal boxes, cigarette advertising, games, and so forth. Rare and hitherto unpublished posters, advertisements, and stills have been included. > Here is a sampling of the fascinating material to be found in this largest picture gallery of Holmes ever assembled: >"Which of You Is Holmes": a chapter on impersonators, comprising over twenty stage and at least thirty screen and television Holmeses, which includes comments from the actors on the problems of portraying him. "I want to make money on 'Holmes' quick, so as to be through with it," William Gillette is quoted as saying, and Alan Wheatley thought, "In my opinion he just seemed to be an insufferable prig," while today's Robert Stephens has said, "When I did it, it was more melancholic, more disillusioned." >An amazing collection of more than seventy pictures of Holmes in and out of disguise, in and out of Baker Street, with and without Watson, and particularly when tackling that demoniac dog in *The Hound of the Baskervilles* (a comparison of the seven film and two television adaptations of this best-known Sherlock Holmes story) >"Furnished Rooms to Let" shows and describes the various settings used in the dramatizations, both interiors of the famous consulting room and exteriors of Baker Street: including the versions of the confrontation there between the two Master Minds >The file even has a firsthand account of that unique expedition of 1968 when Holmes, Watson, and a handful of characters from the adventures toiled through Switzerland to re-enact the Holmes-Moriarty death struggle at the Reichenbach Falls.

The biography of the controversial, pacifist, and feminist Vera Brittain explores her life and experiences, altering the self-portrait presented in her memoirs.

A classic anthology of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most celebrated Sherlock Holmes tales, presenting a curated selection of 11 mysteries that showcase Holmes’s deductive brilliance in Victorian London.

"Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention."--Back cover.

A.J.A. Symons’s life is changed forever when his friend Millard, a dealer in rare books, lends him an old tome and a stack of manuscript letters. The book is *Hadrian the Seventh* (1904), the work of one “Fr. Rolfe”; it is a brilliant and bizarre fantasy, in which a downtrodden English writer is one day unexpectedly elected Pope. The letters tell of the final days of Rolfe (alias Baron Corvo) in Venice – penniless, homeless, and starving – and set out in lurid detail the depths of his sexual depravity. Compelled to learn more about Rolfe and understand how a man who could write a masterpiece like *Hadrian the Seventh* could wind up dying in squalor in Italy, Symons sets out on his ‘Quest for Corvo’, tracing Rolfe’s family, friends, and enemies, and piecing together from their accounts the life of this enigmatic genius. What emerges is a thrilling page-turner, as compelling and mysterious as a detective novel, and as we follow Symons’s quest and discover the often funny, often heartbreaking facts of the life of the eccentric Baron, we make the acquaintance of not one, but two fascinating men: Rolfe and his biographer. Subtitled ‘an experiment in biography’, Symons’s book remains one of the greatest biographies ever written and an enduring work of twentieth-century English literature. This first-ever digital edition makes Symons’s finest work available to a new generation of readers and joins several of Corvo’s works, also available from Valancourt Books.

A companion volume that pairs Arthur Conan Doyle’s most celebrated Sherlock Holmes tales—from “A Study in Scarlet” to “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”—with a collection of contemporary critical essays exploring the mysteries’ literary and cultural significance.