Only nine episodes of the BBC television series Sherlock have been made so far, yet they provided fertile enough ground for a day-long academic symposium yesterday at University College London, in a city that Dr John Watson once called “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”.
Three hundred of those loungers and idlers, if that is not too cruel a description of students on their Easter vacation, were drawn to hear 20 papers delivered by academics from around the world. A speaker from New Hampshire talked about “a Barthesian approach to adaptation and appropriation in Sherlock”, while one from Jagiellonian University in Krakow discussed Sherlock Holmes’s problem with women.
Other lectures looked at the accuracy