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His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award.The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year … The Age of Wonder features a spectacular cast of characters and dramatic set-piece events, including Joseph Banks among the surfing and sexually relaxed Tahitians, Humphry Davy establishing the British chemistry tradition and inventing his miner's lamp, the astronomer William Herschel identifying Uranus, the first planet to be discovered for more than 1,000 years, and an astonishingly gruesome account of the writer Fanny Burney's mastectomy, carried out without anaesthetic, which nevertheless prolonged her life for 20 years.He says that the first notion of the public understanding of science emerged in the Romantic period. "Holmes read English at Cambridge, where he fell under the spell of George Steiner - "he was a revelation.
"Holmes is well aware of the issues his techniques raise and has written about how "empathy is the most powerful, the most necessary, and the most deceptive, of all biographical emotions". But he was driven by an idea of hope and believed things could get better. And you can ask them anything, and they want to explain it immediately by pulling the salt and pepper pots and plates and all that sort of thing. Richard Holmes is one of the very best biographers of the romantic period whose works are set principally in Europe and especially England. Holmes, successful and enthusiastic biographer of the poet Samuel Coleridge, offers up a collection of literary sidetracks, back alleys, and interesting stories uncovered in the course of his researches. Richard Holmes (born 1945) is a British author best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism.BiographyHe is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy.
And there is no substitute, he said, for being there.Those seconds of surrender to an illusion, he said, brought home to him how strongly he empathized with Shelley’s overwhelming loss and grief and deepened Holmes’s understanding of the poet’s longing to repair such a loss. In literary culture, opaqueness often has a high value, but the scientist loves clarity and explaining things. But his early tastes tended towards more modern excitement, such as Paul Brickhill's second world war adventures The Great Escape and The Dam BustersHe recalls one evening being placed next to a Russian mathematician who spoke virtually no English. 'Ah! Holmes sets out the narrative of Shelley's life in great detail - his love affairs, friendships, literary development, financial wranglings with his family and his father-in-law William Godwin, and the years of exile.
in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.
In 1985, Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called Footsteps and the writing of biography was changed forever. But for him, biography has always been a "personal adventure of exploration and pursuit", and it is in this spirit that he has entered the world of 18th-century science. Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. Bestselling military historian Richard Holmes not only illuminates the lives and feelings of the men who served, but also those of the women who followed them across a vast continent, bore their children, and suffered alongside them in the merciless conditions.There's a problem previewing your cart right now.Combining his astute historical analysis with semi-biographical examination, Holmes artfully illustrates the rapid evolution in military and political thinking of the time. What luck put in my hand was the ability to write, and I can't remember a time when I wasn't desperate to be a writer.
“I believe passionately in the biographical form and its power of truth-telling and transformation in lives,” he told his listeners.