"Holmes could be rude, impatient, abrupt, and his intolerance of fools was legendary. I tried to show all this, all of the man's incredible brilliance. But there are some cracks in Holmes's marble, as in an almost-perfect Rodin statue. And I tried to show that, too. It's difficult for me to say what I may have given to the image of Holmes. Faithful to Conan Doyle's text, certainly. Also, I've tried to bring out the emotion that is there in Holmes. On the surface he seems a cold, sometimes dark, rather off-putting figure. But deeper down, I think, he's a man of feeling." Jeremy Jeremy Brett is still recognised as the most celebrated incarnation of Sherlock Holmes which he presented for ten years. Jeremy delighted viewers with his dashing, arrogant, moody interpretation of the most popular famous detective he brought a brooding intensity to his finest role - one of disturbing power. He is still called the definitive Sherlock Holmes. Important Note: This book is an extract from the 468 page biography, 'Jeremy Brett - Playing a Part' - this book contains the Sherlock Holmes section only. If you already have the full book then there is minimal additional content here. We wanted, however, to make a Sherlock Holmes specific version available.

Sara B. Pritchard traces the Rhône’s remaking since 1945, showing how state officials, technical elites, and citizens connected the environment and technology to political identities and state-building, and demonstrating the importance of environmental management and technological development to the culture and politics of modern France.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

In this entertaining and informative book, Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives. From book agents flogging Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs to John H. Patterson's famous pyramid strategy at National Cash Register to the determined efforts by Ford and Chevrolet to craft surefire sales pitches for their dealers, selling evolved from an art to a science. "Salesmanship" as a term and a concept arose around the turn of the century, paralleling the new science of mass production. Managers assembled professional forces of neat responsible salesmen who were presented as hardworking pillars of society, no longer the butt of endless "traveling salesmen" jokes. People became prospects; their homes became territories. As an NCR representative said, the modern salesman "let the light of reason into dark places." The study of selling itself became an industry, producing academic disciplines devoted to marketing, consumer behavior, and industrial psychology. At Carnegie Mellon's Bureau of Salesmanship Research, Walter Dill Scott studied the characteristics of successful salesmen and ways to motivate consumers to buy. Full of engaging portraits and illuminating insights, Birth of a Salesman is a singular contribution that offers a clear understanding of the transformation of salesmanship in modern America. Reviews of this book: The history Friedman weaves is engrossing and the book hits stride with entertaining chapters on Mark Twain's marketing of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (apparently Twain was as talented a businessman as a writer) and on the shift from the drummer--the middleman between wholesalers and regional shopkeepers--to the department store...In Birth of a Salesman, Friedman has crafted a history of an 'inherently unlikable process' with depth, affection and intelligent analysis. --Carlo Wolff, Boston Globe I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is well written, well argued, and thoroughly researched. Salesmen, Friedman argues, helped distribute the products of America's increasingly bountiful manufacturing industries, invented new forms of managerial hierarchies, investigated the psychology of desire, and were in the vanguard of America's transformation from a producer to a consumer society. He powerfully shows that the rise of modern business practices and the emergence of a particularly American culture of consumption can only be fully understood if we examine the history of selling. --Sven Beckert, author of The Monied Metropolis Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America is an important book. The modern industrial economy, created in the United States and Europe between the 1880s and the 1930s, required the integration of large-scale production and marketing. The evolution of mass production is a well-known story, but Friedman is the first to fill in the crucial marketing side of that industrial revolution. --Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., author of The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope With wit and verve, Walter Friedman gives us a cast of memorable characters who turned salesmanship from ballyhoo to behaviorism, from silliness to science. Informed by prodigious research, Birth of a Salesman also clarifies the birth of modern marketing--from an angle that humanizes its subject through wry, ironic, but serious analysis. This is a pioneering work on a subject crucial to American social, cultural, and business history. --Thomas K. McCraw, author of Creating Modern Capitalism

The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of ones quarrels with others while poetry is the expression of ones quarrel with oneself. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poets mind.

Covering a forty year period from first leaving Central School of Speech and Drama until his early death at the age of 61, Playing a Part is a full career book of "a very fine actor" who would delight audiences as a sensitive lover or as a haunted murderer.