Overview

In this chronicle of his lifelong obsession with re-creating the lives of writers and scientists, Richard Holmes here casts a new eye not only on the Romantic poets and lost women of Romantic science he has long studied, but on their biographers, as well. He examines the evolution of the myths that have overshadowed certain lives (Percy Shelley's death at sea, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-fueled lectures), and reveals how the manner in which each generation tells the stories of the lives that came before it shapes and is shaped by a contemporary understanding of human nature. These portraits are deftly woven with Holmes' own experience as a biographer. A spellbinding examination of the nature of biographical knowledge, brimming with the infectious curiosity of Holmes' catalog.

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9781520066899

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Richard Holmes is the author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and has been translated into eleven languages. Among his many accolades, Holmes won the Somerset Maugham Prize for Shelly: The Pursuit. An Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy, he was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain. Charles Armstrong trained at the Drama Studio. His theatre work includes Stop Messing About (Leicester Square Theatre) and Round The Horne Revisited (West End and Tour). He has also worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, National, and many Repertory Theaters. His work on film and TV includes Scoop, EastEnders, Poirot, Head Over Heels, and The Navigators. He has recorded numerous voiceovers, documentaries, radio dramas, and audiobooks.

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