Sidetracks

A beautifully reissued classic, a mixture of biography and memoir, from the author of FootstepsSidetracks is a sister book to Footsteps, conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies like Shelley and Coleridge. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities: some French, some English, some Dutch, some American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and Gautier, Pierrot and Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, James Boswell and Zelide, MR James and some very unpleasant gothic apparitions. With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The book includes two documentary radio-plays, many different kinds of character sketch and travelogue, true love stories and true ghost stories, and one piece, 'Dr Johnson's First Cat' which may or may not be a piec

About the Author :
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 ten New York Times’ Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. 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 (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), 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, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Review :
'An enchanting mixture of biography and memoir by the writer who has done more than any to illuminate biography's genome project -- mapping, without confusing, the complex chemistry of subject and quest.' Alan Judd, Daily Telegraph 'A delightfully eccentric volume that Boswell would have adored and Johnson well understood.' Robert McCrum, Observer 'The shimmering sensuality of his prose, his ability to make landscape live and his touching honesty gives his writing the power and pace of good fiction.' Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Telegraph 'This is magically compelling storytelling, set in a time of poets and phantoms, of ghosts and the Grand Guignol.' Iain Finlayson, The Times 'Above all, Holmes is a storyteller, transforming desiccated history into literary flesh and blood. He transports the reader alongside him into the past. This book is a masterful study of the human heart -- his, yours, mine -- demonstrating that, in the right hands, biography can be the most dazzling literary form of all.' Sara Wheeler, Daily Telegraph 'Nothing can detract from the substance, elegance and unshowy cleverness of his writing, on Voltaire, on Shelley, John Stuart Mill, the Lisle letters -- on anything that engages Holmes's very uncommon sense.' Claire Harman, Evening Standard