How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method by Brian McCuskey (review)

Abstract

In her mid-1890s biographical dictionary, Zaynab Fawwaz ended her biography of Cleopatra with relish: “Cleopatra always loved revelry and debauchery, and frequenting places of pleasure. . . . Her days were sweet, her nights a treat. Her life held times of delight, and her tales sate the appetite” (Booth, Classes, 333). Arabophone readers, like their Anglophone peers but also differently, conjured “deathly queens and empowered womanhood” as they wrote ancient Egypt into contemporary preoccupations, and as they made and consumed products in their daily lives, whether cigarettes in London or hair pomades in Alexandria (Dobson 2). Marilyn Booth University of Oxford