Sidetracks

Description

In this classic work, 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.

Richard Holmes is our greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Footsteps (1985) revolutionized the way biography was thought about and written. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. His portrait of the friendship between Dr Johnson and Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. The concluding volume of his Coleridge biography won the Duff Cooper Prize and the William Heinemann award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy, and lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

'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 'Nothing can detract from the substance, elegance and unshowy cleverness of his writing, on Voltaire, on Shelley, John Stuart Mill, the Lisle letters -- on anything that engages Holmes's very uncommon sense.' Claire Harman, Evening Standard