Footsteps

Description

Richard Holmes's great work of biographical exploration, published 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.

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. In 1974 he published "Shelley: The Pursuit" which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as "surely the best biography of Shelley ever written". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1992 was awarded an OBE. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

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