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

Coleridge: Early Visions

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

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

Dusty Warriors : Modern Soldiers at War

History

Military

HarperPress

A magisterial new history of the British soldier - a man famously described by the Duke of Wellington as 'the scum of the earth'. From battlefield to barrack-room, this book is stuffed to the brim with anecdotes and stories of soldiers from the army of Charles II, through Empire and two World Wars to modern times. The British soldier forms a core component of British history. In this scholarly but gossipy book, Richard Holmes presents a rich social history of the man (and now more frequently woman) who have been at the heart of his writing for decades. Technological, political and social changes have all made their mark on the development of warfare, but have the attitudes of the soldier shifted as much we might think? For Holmes, the soldier is part of a unique tribe -- and the qualities of loyalty and heroism have continued to grow amongst these men. And while today the army constitutes the smallest proportion of the population since the first decade of its existence (regular soldier

Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

HarperCollins, Publishers

Physical description; xxvii, 564 p., [24] p. of plates : ill. (some col.), maps, geneal. table ; 24 cm. Subjects; Marlborough, John Churchill Duke of 1650-1722. Generals - Great Britain - Biography. Statesmen - Great Britain - Biography.

Marlborough: England's Fragile Genius

Historical

Shots from the Front: The British Soldier 1914-18

UK General Books

This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

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Books by RICHARD HOLMES