Richard Holmes (biographer)

Richard Holmes (biographer) Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, Order of the British Empire OBE, Royal Society of Literature FRSL, British Academy FBA (born 5 November 1945) is a British biographer, memoirist, editor, and professor emeritus of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. Holmes's Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) won the Somerset Maugham Award (1977); Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 won the Costa Book Awards Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Biography (1989); Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography (1993); and Coleridge: Darker Reflections won in 1998 both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. Holmes is editor for the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies. Quotes Talking with a younger generation of readers, I see how Shelley has become increasingly a European figure, a Dante among English poets, and an image of Faustian daring, whose writing and travels still inspire that primary spirit of adventure into a wider world of ideal possibilities. Nothing is so moving to the List of biographers biographer as finding an old copy of his book in a stranger's hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its poetry underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its cover bleached with sun and sea. Preface to New Edition (1994) Shelley: The Pursuit New York Review Books Classics New York Review of Books 2013 9781590175705 https://books.google.com/books?id=0yjSkKRu4vcC&pg=PA9 (880 pages; 1st edition 1974; revised edition 1994) The Timeline of scientific discoveries#17th century scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its lingua franca was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of scholars and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public.This became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the ‘experimental method' became the basis of a new, secular Lebensphilosophie philosophy of life, in which the infinite Seven Natural Wonders (CNN) wonders of Creation (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake. Prologue The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2009 9780307378323 https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Age_of_Wonder.html?id=sSLJnGMUw9wC&pg=PR19 xv–xxi (576 pages; quote from p. xix; 1st edition 2008) At eighteen, just out of Catholic school Roman Catholic school and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red Hardcover hardback with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the Lozère, following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a Backpack rucksack, sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The Cévennes is like a French version of the Scottish Highlands, wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle toile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a Traveller%27s cheque traveler’s check for fifty Pound sterling pounds in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began. as quoted by Lucas Wittman in: Richard Holmes, The Art of Biography No. 7, Interviewed by Lucas Wittmann Issue 223 Winter 2017 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7090/the-art-of-biography-no-7-richard-holmes Quotes about Richard Holmes It is a brilliant vignette, prompting a meditation on the role of memory in biographical writing, and an exploration of the things that get forgotten in the writing of lives. Throughout This Long Pursuit, Holmes moves between reflections on the subjects of his career as a List of biographers biographer and sketches of himself at work. We see him lecturing on Coleridge at the Royal Institution, scribbling at a table in the Cévennes, scurrying from the National Portrait Gallery with a glossy catalogue under his arm and newly discovered stories brimming in his mind. The result is a glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, Footsteps (autobiography) ’’Footsteps’’ and Sidetracks (book) ’’Sidetracks’’. Daisy Hay, The Guardian This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic biographer – review. Richard Holmes explores the literary art of telling a life story in this glorious autobiographical study 23 October 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/23/this-long-pursuit-reflections-of-a-romantic-biographer-richard-holmes-review Holmes is not offering a history of either Balloon (aeronautics) ballooning or its technologies. The Montgolfier brothers Montgolfiers and Vincenzo Lunardi are barely mentioned (perhaps because they feature in The Age of Wonder). What we have instead is a "cluster of balloon stories" drawn from life and fiction, and more from life than from fiction. Some of the footnotes are anecdotal, but the book itself is more than that; Holmes is a distinguished biographer with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around them. David Simpson Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes – review. The story of ballooning – the individuals who sailed serenely, and those who plummeted – is drawn from life and fiction with moving results The Guardian 18 May 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/18/falling-upwards-richard-holmes-review External links Richard Gordon Heath Holmes (1945–), Writer National Portrait Gallery (npg.org.uk) https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?LinkID=mp68782 Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Academics from England Category:American Book Award winners Category:Biographers from England Category:Fellows of the British Academy Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:People from London Category:University of Cambridge alumni Category:Memoirists from England