Footsteps by Richard Holmes

Footsteps by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes knew he had become a true biographer the day his bank bounced a check that he had inadvertently dated 1772. Because for the acclaimed chronicler of Shelley and Coleridge, biography is a physical pursuit, an ardent and arduous retracing of footsteps that may have vanished centuries before.

In this gripping book, Holmes takes us from France's Massif Central, where he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and a sweet-natured donkey, to Mary Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Paris, to the Italian villages where Percy Shelley tried to cast off the strictures of English morality and marriage. Footsteps is a wonderful exploration of the ties between biographers and their subjects, filled with passion and revelations.

Deeply impressive . . . Footsteps is a singular event in the modern history of biography, and in itself a delightful reading experience.--Alfred Kazin

This exhilarating book, part biography, part autobiography, shows the biographer as sleuth and huntsman, tracking his subjects through space and time.--The Observer

A modern masterpiece . . . Holmes is] the most romantic of contemporary biographers and probably the most revolutionary in spirit and form.--Michael Holroyd, author of Bernard Shaw

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of The New York Times Book Review's Best Books of the Year. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was a New Republic Best Book of the Yearand one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Non-fiction Books of the Year. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (an NBCC finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780340283370
ISBN 10	0340283378
Title	Footsteps
Author	Richard Holmes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton General Division
Year published	1985-07-01
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.