Richard Holmes

Broschiertes Buch

This Long Pursuit

Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Beschreibung

Richard Holmes's luminous meditation on the art of biography explores the fascinating relationship between fact and fiction through his own personal experience as a biographer. Ranging widely over art, science, and poetry, Holmes describes a pilgrimage of the heart that has taken him across three centuries. He powerfully evokes the lives of women both scientific and literary: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes investigates the reductive myths that have overshadowed some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the opium-soaked Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary William Blake. This great chronicler of the Romantics has produced a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.

Autor

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Random House UK
• Seitenzahl: 400
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Februar 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 201mm x 130mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 408g
• ISBN-13: 9780307742346
• ISBN-10: 0307742342
• Artikelnr.: 48915398

Rezensionen

'A must read ... intriguing and satisfying ... All the sketches makes illuminating reading, in many cases deliberately setting out to provoke a rethink of earlier biographies ... I thoroughly enjoyed the book; indeed I devoured it' Athene Donald, Guardian

'Compulsive, fastidious journey through 50 years of his own notebooks ... Holmes gives an insight into his methods', Books of the Year, Observer

'A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, Footsteps and Sidetracks ... heaven for Holmes fans ... the best account imaginable for the richness of his form' Observer

'This collection of 50 years of high-profile lectures and anthology contributions offers us a lorryload of arresting subjects ... 'This Long Pursuit' is distinguished by a geniality of tone ... Holmes's eye for detail is as sharp as ever' The Times

'Holmes writes beautifully ofthe perils of memory and forgetting ... perhaps the essay that best sums up Holmes's endeavour is his superb explosion of the accepted account of Coleridge's 1808 lectures to the Royal Institution ... a masterly performance by ... the greatest literary biographer of his generation' The Oldie