Автор: Дмитрий Коропенко
Уровень: средний и выше
Здравствуйте, дорогой читатель,
позвольте представить вам сегодня удивительную книгу знаменитого английского писателя Артура Конан Дойля – “Шерлок Холмс”. Я буквально в восторге от красоты языка и гармоничности изложения этого шедевра. Если на данный момент вы колеблетесь, какую очередную богатую английскую книгу почитать для обогащения своего английского словаря – считайте, что вы уже нашли.
Ознакомьтесь, пожалуйста, с описанием данного шедевра мировой литературы. Как всегда, мы не просто читаем, а внимательно анализируем выделенные фразы, переводим незнакомые слова с помощью словаря и подбираем свои объяснения для конкретной фразы на английском языке.
Ссылка на текст книги дана после ее описания.
Я сам просто балдею от красоты языка этой книги.
Doyle said that the character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations. However, some years later Bell wrote in a letter to Conan Doyle: “You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it.” Sir Henry Littlejohn, Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, is also cited as an inspiration for Holmes. Littlejohn served as Police Surgeon and Medical Officer of Health of Edinburgh, providing for Doyle a link between medical investigation and the detection of crime.
In the first story, A Study in Scarlet, something of Holmes’s background is given. In early 1881, he is presented as an independent student of chemistry with a variety of very curious side interests, almost all of which turn out to be single-mindedly bent towards making him superior at solving crimes. (When he appears for the first time, he is crowing with delight at having invented a new method for detecting bloodstains; in other stories he indulges in recreational home-chemistry experiments, sometimes filling the rooms with foul-smelling vapours.)
Excerpt from the book:
“No–I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up
in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has
never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very
desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way
knowledge which would astonish his professors.”“Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes–it approaches to coldbloodedness.
I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest
vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply
out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.
To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same
readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.”“Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the
subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a
bizarre shape.”
Sherlock Holmes remains a great inspiration for forensic science in literature, especially for the way his acute study of a crime scene yields small clues as to the precise sequence of events. He makes great use of trace evidence such as shoe and tire impressions, as well as fingerprints, ballistics and handwriting analysis, now known as questioned document examination. Such evidence is used to test theories conceived by the police, for example, or by the investigator himself. All of the techniques advocated by Holmes later became reality, but were generally in their infancy at the time Conan Doyle was writing. In many of his reported cases, Holmes frequently complains of the way the crime scene has been contaminated by others, especially by the police, emphasising the critical importance of maintaining its integrity, a now well-known feature of crime scene examination.
OK, now that you have perused through the passages, look at the bold expressions and think of their equivalents! This exercise will increase your vocabulary resemblance to native speakers’ vocabulary.
The link is here: Ссылка здесь:
See you in the articles to follow.
Bye-bye,
Dmitri Koropenko