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This Long Pursuit - Richard Holmes

By Richard Holmes

Release Date: 2017-03-07

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

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From the award-winning author of The Age of Wonder and Falling Upwards, here is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the authorā€™s own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. 

  In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetimeā€™s obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de StaĆ«l, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual ZĆ©lide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. 

  The diversity of Holmesā€™s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spiritā€”and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insiderā€™s account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.

This Long Pursuit - Richard Holmes

By Richard Holmes

Release Date: 2017-03-07

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

(0 ratings)
Read Download
From the award-winning author of The Age of Wonder and Falling Upwards, here is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the authorā€™s own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. 

  In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetimeā€™s obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de StaĆ«l, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual ZĆ©lide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. 

  The diversity of Holmesā€™s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spiritā€”and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insiderā€™s account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.

More by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder

Wellington

Falling Upwards

Redcoat

Footsteps

Sahib

Tommy

Rebels and Redcoats

Coleridge

D-Day The Concise History

The Boundless Deep

Shelley: The Pursuit

I am Soldier

This Long Pursuit

Coleridge

Sidetracks

Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

A Short Residence in Sweden & Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman'

In The Footsteps of Churchill

Noah

Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804

Sidetracks

A Guide to Battles

Churchill's Bunker

The Road to Derry: A Brief History

D-Day Remembered

Big River Turkey Farm

L'etĆ  della meraviglia

Human Resource Management in the British Armed Forces

Defence Management in Uncertain Times

CHURCHILLCHYA PAULKHUNA

The Transcendence of the World: Phenomenological Studies

MY BIT

Derry Revisited

Huellas

La edad de los prodigios

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