Footsteps - Softcover

Holmes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006548407 ISBN 13: 9780006548409

Publisher: Flamingo, 2004

Synopsis

Richard Holmes’s great work of biographical exploration, rejacketed and republished alongside its sister volume ‘Sidetracks’.

In 1985, Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called ‘Footsteps’ and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mix of travel, biographical sleuthing and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains ons of the most intoxicating, magical works of modern literary exploration ever published.

Sleeping rough, he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson's famous journey through the Cevennes. Caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s, he dives back in time to the terrors of Wordsworth and of Mary Wollstonecraft marooned in Revolutionary Paris and then into the strange tortured worlds of Gérard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy, he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.

About this title

Review:

‘This exhilarating book, part biography, part autobiography, shows the biographer as sleuth and huntsman, tracking his subjects through space and time.’ Hilary Spurling, Observer

‘Nothing is simple in this intricate, complicated and fascinating book, which is like a set of Russian dolls, biography containing travel-writing containing autobiography containing and so on...Holmes is indeed a biographer and a romantic in every sense.’ Richard Boston, Guardian

About the Author:

Richard Holmes is the author of the prize-winning and bestselling ‘The Age of Wonder’, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (USA). He has written many other books including ‘Falling Upwards’, an uplifting account of the pioneering generation of balloon aeronauts, which was one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2013. His trilogy exploring the Romantic Biographer at work, begun with the classic ‘Footsteps’, and its companion volume ‘Sidetracks’, is now completed by ‘This Long Pursuit’. His first biography, ‘Shelley: The Pursuit’, won the Somerset Maugham Prize; ‘Coleridge: Early Visions’ won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; ‘Coleridge: Darker Reflections’ won the Duff Cooper and the Heinemann Awards; ‘Dr Johnson & Mr Savage’ won the James Tait Black Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of East Anglia, East London and Kingston, and was Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007. He is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0006548407
• ISBN 13: 9780006548409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288