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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
‘A modern masterpiece’ Michael Holroyd
‘Wonderful’ A. S. Byatt
'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
‘His purpose is to locate “the personal life that is hidden in, and below, the printed page” and then to understand that life by and act of identification. There is nothing more eloquent in this book than Holmes’ account of the biographer’s obsession with the past – that feeling of being “haunted”’ Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times
‘His books read like shouts of joy’ New York Times Book Review
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 Gérard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy, he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.
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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.
What makes this book particularly fascinating and unusual is the part played in these tales by the author himself. Surrounded by these literary giants it is Holmes himself who is the hero of the story. And hero he is. The author is clearly obsessed with his subject (in this context something to be admired) and pushes himself to the limits of his mental and to a lesser extent physical limits in pursuit of his quarry. For instance, we are told that when Holmes was writing his subsequent book on Shelley he wrote only at night, catching up on his sleep during the day and that the whole task was accomplished in a state of black depression. This man is serious!
There are so many more good things to say about this book but it's only 275 pages long so why not get a copy and read it? You won't regret it. And when you've finished be certain to read Holmes' peerless two part biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; "Early Visions" and "Darker Reflections", the finest literary biographies ever written.
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