Philip’s Reviews > Mycroft Holmes > Status Update

Oh God, a British character's just done that thing Americans do of referring to someone as "Sir [Surname]". How can a book research its history so thoroughly but get such basic stuff wrong?

It's a pity that this book's evident attention to detail in the historical setting didn't extend to the language. The Victorian diction is very inconsistent, veering (in the chapter I've just read) from "Adam's spawn" meaning "people" -- absurdly poetical in any century, surely -- to jarringly modern idioms like "risk averse" and "one-year anniversary". This is setting my teeth on edge a bit.