Sidetracks - Couverture souple

Holmes, Richard

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0006548431 ISBN 13 : 9780006548430

Editeur : Flamingo, 2001

Synopsis

Sidetracks is not a sequel but 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 piece of true biographical fiction.The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread, in which Holmes the Romantic biographer writes: `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.’

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as `surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.

He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Flamingo
• Date d'édition: 2001
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0006548431
• ISBN 13: 9780006548430
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 416
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible