Richard Holmes

Sidetracks (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In the ebook version of the classic, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical stories that have captured his fancy in the course of researching his books on the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.

'Sidetracks' 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. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever.'

The centerpiece of book concerns Mary Woolstonecraft, the great feminist crusader and philosopher, and her relationship with William Godwin. Their story and travails are inspiring and poignant, all told in riveting and beautiful prose style.

'Sidetracks' winds 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 piece of true biographical fiction.

'Sidetracks' is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated Holmes.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins Publishers
• Seitenzahl: 432
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. November 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780007380312
• Artikelnr.: 39967719

Autorenporträt

Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, and editor of the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies launched in 2004. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992.

His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer in 1985, and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer in 2000.

Inhaltsangabe

I. A Romantic Premontion
Introduction
Thomas Chatteron
II. Lost in France
Introduction
Monsieur Nadar
Gautier in London
Poor Pierrot
Inside the Tower
III. Five Gothic Shadows
Introduction
The Singular Affair of the Reverend Mr Barham
The Reverend Maturin and Mr Melmoth
M. R. James and Others
John Stuart Mill
Lord Lisle and the Tudor Nixon Tapes
IV. A Philosophical Love Story
Introduction
The Feminist and the Philosopher: A Love Story
V. Shelley’s Ghost
Introduction
Scrope’s Last Throw
To the Tempest Given
VI. Escapes to Paris
Introduction
Scott and Zelda: One Last Trip
A Summer with the Novelist
Letters from Paris
Voltaire’s Grin
VII. Homage to the Godfather
Introduction
Boswell’s Bicentenary
Boswell Among the Tulips
Dr. Johnson’s First Cat