Product Description

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 Gerard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy, he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203672 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

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 our greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Footsteps (1985) revolutionized the way biography was thought about and written. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. His portrait of the friendship between Dr Johnson and Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. The concluding volume of his Coleridge biography won the Duff Cooper Prize and the William Heinemann award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy, and lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Customer Reviews

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by R Holmes
What an unexpectedly engrossing read! Richard Holmes reveals the soul-searching and obsessive art of biography writing in his semi-autobiographical travel diary through time and space. He retraces the footsteps of the great writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley and French writer Gérard de Nerval as they go about their romantic, and oft tragic, adventures through Europe and abroad in search of literary inspiration.

Holmes brings the past to vivid life, exploring his protagonists and their environments so intimately that reader and author alike become lost together in history, only to find the return to reality and the present a rude, yet welcoming awakening.