Douglas Kerr

Conan Doyle : writing, profession, and practice

1. INTRODUCTION Practice Profession 2. SPORT Sport and the nation The straight left A nation of amateurs 3. MEDICINE The statement of the case The consultants In general practice The cold detective 4 SCIENCE The curious adventure in Berlin Monsters and committees Thinking like a scientist 5 LAW AND ORDER Crimes and punishments Edaljis eyes 6 ARMY AND EMPIRE Soldier boys Army Empire 7 SPIRIT Church Spiritualism Fairies The new life

Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing

Eastern Figures is a literary history with a difference. It examines British writing about the East - centred on India but radiating as far as Egypt and the Pacific - in the colonial and postcolonial period.

Orwell's BBC broadcasts: Colonial discourse and the rhetoric of propaganda

From August 1941 to November 1943 George Orwell worked in the Indian Section of the BBCs Eastern Service, broadcasting radio programmes to India. At this time of the Second World War, India came under real threat of invasion from the advancing Japanese, and there was anxiety in London that the loyalty of the Indian subjects of the Raj might not be relied on in these critical months. An important part of the work of the Eastern Service was propaganda, and the anti-imperialist Orwell found himself part of an institution and discourse devoted to encouraging Indian loyalty to the Empire. This article examines the rhetoric of Orwells BBC broadcasts, and particularly the weekly news commentaries he wrote, as a special and especially conflicted case of colonial discourse, in which Orwells commitment to the anti-fascist cause seems to run head-first into his commitment to the end of Empire. It also looks at the propaganda tropes through which the broadcasts seek to persuade their Indian listeners of where their interests lie in this national and global crisis.

Wilfred Owen's Voices: Language and Community

Introduction. Part 1 Family: hearth and home fathers and sons brothers in arms Susan. Part 2 Church: praying together drink and the devil the work of the ministry troublesome voices. Part 3 Army: the disciplines of the wars Wilfred Owens England morale and breakdown officers and others. Part 4 Poetry: a history of poetry a modern voice English elegies soldiers and poets.

Timothy Mo’s Man Sundae, and Other Overseas Workers

Everyone knows who Man Friday is. The Man Sundae of my title refers to the titular hero and narrator of Timothy Mo’s most recent novel, Renegade or Halo (1999). The book’s first chapter is appropriately concerned with first the body and then the name of the hero, or rather his naming, for though he has been ‘‘loftily christened Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro’’, he will travel through his story under a series of nicknames, pet names and noms de guerre. This multiplicity of names reflects his protean and adaptive nature as well as the scandal of his provenance, which affronts most of the usual categories of identity. Rey, or Sugar Rey, is the son of a Filipina bargirl from Mactan and an African American serviceman. Not surprisingly, his anomalous appearance prompts his earliest schoolmates to call him Frankenstein, but while the nickname serves as the ignition for a recurring theme, the novel’s interest in forms of monstrosity, it doesn’t quite catch on in the playground, because Rey is ‘‘too bright and friendly’’ to be Frankenstein’s monster. In an early instance of complicity, he obligingly supplies a nickname for himself, when the other urchins are debating what he should be called:

Holmes into Challenger: The Dark Investigator

This chapter explores the kinship between Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s next best-known serial protagonist, Professor George Edward Challenger, examining some of the ways that Challenger is a continuation and a criticism of what Holmes embodied. Holmes the “scientific detective” is taken here as an instantiation of the modern professional expert, a pivotal figure in the Victorian knowledge revolution. The portrayal of Holmes’s powers is an index of the awe in which Conan Doyle and his contemporaries held these experts, but it also reveals an anxiety about the way these masters of knowledge could appear inhuman and irresponsible. These tendencies in Holmes reappear in the person of Challenger, the scientific investigator pursuing knowledge with an egotistical disregard for the consequences.

Law and Race in George Orwell

Abstract As Eric Blair, the young George Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1929, a time of growing Burmese discontent with British rule. He wrote about Burma in a novel, Burmese Days, and a number of non-fictional writings. This article considers the nature of the law-and-order regime Orwell served in Burma, especially in the light of racial self-interest and Britains commitment to the principle of the rule of law, and traces the issues of race and the law to his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The straight left: Sport and the nation in Arthur Conan Doyle

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Arthur Conan Doyle, a prolific writer with a global reputation and readership, was settled with his family at Hindhead in Surrey. In his Memories and Adventures ( M&A ) he was to recall this period as an interlude of peace: “The country was lovely. My life was filled with alternate work and sport. As with me so with the nation” (151). This last sentence refers chiefly to the apparent placidity of the time, soon to be rudely spoilt by the outbreak of the South African war, which was to prove a critical and formative testing-ground for Great Britain and for Conan Doyle personally. But the sentence can also refer to the plenitude of a life divided between work and sport, and I will argue that Conan Doyle would be right to claim his experience here as representative of the national life. At the end of the century which invented modern sport, Conan Doyles enthusiastic participation in sports, his writing about the subject, and his understanding of sporting culture have a great deal to tell us about Victorian Britain. As with him, so with the nation.

A Passage to Kowloon Tong: Paul Theroux and Hong Kong 1997:

It was certainly received as such in the press. Newsweek reviewed it among a clutch of six novels that &dquo;use the handover of Hong Kong back to China as a dramatic backdrop to their narratives&dquo; (adding, &dquo;Sadly, none of these novels is particularly good&dquo;).’ In the London Observer, &dquo;The handover to China is approaching and the story is what you might expect.&dquo;2 Kevin Kwong, a Hong Kong reviewer, said it was written &dquo;simply to cash