The Times Magazine will be serializing ELENA VANISHING and HOPE AND OTHER LUXURIES next month, so last week, they flew a photographer out to Frankfurt to photograph me. What an honor! The Times is a venerable institution. It has had the same name and, indeed, the same logo since 1788.
Of course, when I think of The Times, I immediately think of London’s most famous fictional resident, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It’s arguable whether more people around the world recognize Baker Street or Downing Street thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective:
“Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece.” (The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb)
So there was a lovely bit of serendipity when I learned that Mark Harrison, the wonderful photographer who came out to photograph me, had also photographed Benedict Cumberbatch, the latest in an illustrious line of Sherlocks. I’m a Jeremy Brett fan myself, but I’ve enjoyed Cumberbatch’s Sherlock too.