Shelley : The Pursuit

The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.

RICHARD HOLMES

Biographies & Memoirs

Harpercollins

Sheds new light on poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, revealing the intricacies of both his personality and his literary vision

Coleridge: Early Visions

Harper-collins Publishers

Sidetracks is not a sequel but a sister book to Footsteps, conjured up from decades of `wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies like Shelley and Coleridge. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities: some French, some English, some Dutch, some American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and Gautier, Pierrot and Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, James Boswell and Zelide, MR James and some very unpleasant gothic apparitions. With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The book includes two documentary radio-plays, many different kinds of character sketch and travelogue, true love stories and true ghost stories, and one piece, `Dr Johnson's First Cat' which may or may not be a piece of true biographical fiction.The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread, in which Holmes the Romantic biographer writes: `to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever.'

Sidetracks

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Flamingo

Richard Holmes, military historian and broadcaster, here tells the story of Britain's greatest-ever soldier, the man who posed the most serious threat to Napoleon. Holmes charts the Duke of Wellington's stellar military career from India to Europe, and in the process, rediscovers the reasons Queen Victoria called him the greatest man the 19th century had produced. Combining his historical analysis with a semi-biographical examination of Wellington, Holmes illustrates the rapid evolution in military and political thinking of the time. Wellington is a brilliant figure, idealistic in politics, cynical in love, a wit, a beau, a man of enormous courage often sickened by war. As Richard Holmes charts his progress from a shy, indolent boy to commander-in-chief of the allied forces, he also exposes the Iron Duke as a philanderer, and a man who sometimes despised the men that he led, and was not always in control of his soldiers.

Wellington

HARPER/COLLINS

Book Description Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes's dazzling portrait of the age of great scientific discovery is a groundbreaking achievement. The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of artistic and scientific discovery -- astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical -- that together made up the 'age of wonder'. In this breathtaking group biography, Richard Holmes tells the stories of the period's celebrated innovators and their great scientific discoveries: from telescopic sight to the miner's lamp, and from the first balloon flight to African exploration.

Age Of Wonder

History

UK General Books

Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets.

Coleridge

Arts & Literature

Harper-perennial

Having visited each Coleridge haunt, the author also covers Coleridge's childhood in Devon, his formative school years at Christ's Hospital in London, his days at Jesus College, Cambridge and escape to the 15th Light Dragoons, his marriage and eventual departure for the Mediterranean.

Dusty Warriors : Modern Soldiers at War

Military

HarperPress

Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Shots from the Front: The British Soldier 1914-18

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by RICHARD HOLMES. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by RICHARD HOLMES

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by RICHARD HOLMES. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Shelley : The Pursuit

Coleridge: Early Visions

Sidetracks

Wellington

Age Of Wonder

Coleridge

Coleridge

Dusty Warriors : Modern Soldiers at War

Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Shots from the Front: The British Soldier 1914-18