Stephen Fry

Television

‘I love to lose myself in a mystery’, Sir Thomas Browne confesses in Religio Medici. I know what he means. There are few more enjoyable pastimes than snuggling up with a good murder. But such mysteries are penetrable, ‘susceptible of rational explanation’ as Sherlock Holmes might say. Holmes, incidentally, is currently to be seen in a marvellous new incarnation on ITV every week, played by Jeremy Brett, who has overcome the fact that as a young man he was, to use a phrase of Anthony Burgess’s, ‘irrelevantly endowed with adventitious photogeneity’ and is now, in his maturity, acting magnificently. In the current series we have been treated to ‘The Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’, in both of which ‘all of my friend’s remarkable powers were needed’.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    Follow Us