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"""Holmes's Lives"" is a series of classic English biographies, edited and introduced by Richard Holmes. In this series, Richard Holmes sets out to recover the great forgotten tradition of English biography writing, and reaffirms the enduring excitement of classic non-fiction. Humphrey Davy was that strange amalgam - a Romantic Scientist. He was fond of composing verses, sketching, making fireworks, fishing, shooting and collecting minerals. While still a youth, Davy had plans for a volume of poems, but when he began the serious study of science in 1797, these visions ""fled before the voice of truth"". Amongst many other achievements he went on to discover several chemical elements (including sodium and potassium) and compounds, he invented the miner's safety lamp, found the Zoological Society and ran the Royal Society, becoming in the process one of the greatest exponents of the scientific method. This memoir, written by his son, vividly brings both man and scientist to life, set against a backdrop of political and cultural revolution."

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9780007111787

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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.

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