



Sidetracks
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching 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 of Shelley and Coleridge. As Holmes himself says, '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 the book is the poignant, inspiring story of Mary Woolstonecraft, the great feminist crusader and philosopher and her husband, William Godwin. But 'Sidetracks' winds through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities, all made hypnotically alive through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and Gautier, Pierrot and Voltaire, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, James Boswell and Zelide, MR James and some very unpleasant gothic apparitions.
'Sidetracks' is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography.
Reviews
‘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
About the author
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These "b-sides and rarities" (stories that arrested Holmes's attention while he was investigating his principal subjects) of an eminent literary biographer, most recognized for his two-volume life of Coleridge, present an atypical mixture of autobiography, literary criticism and travel narrative recalling his 1985 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and spanning more than 30 years of a prolific career. Claiming "to find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way," Holmes looks back on how the fickle connection between a biographer and his subject comes into existence by examining his own writing. Just as Wallace Stevens incessantly struggled to "catch" his imagination in the very act of imagining, this collection shows that Holmes has always tried to "catch" himself in the very act of writing about someone or something else. Whether writing about the relatively obscure poet Chatterton (a "sidetrack" to Keats) or about figures as well-known as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (retracing the couple's last trip to Europe together), Holmes approaches biography as a kind of literary game, a puzzle whose pieces he puts together to tell readers why things happened as they did. The result is almost novelistic. A BBC radio play takes readers inside the minds of the poet Shelley and his wife, Mary. Though they lack an overall sense of unity, these pieces undeniably confirm why Holmes has been setting new and challenging standards for how biographers approach their subjects, and they make for glorious reading indeed.