Best Selling Books by RICHARD HOLMES

Holmes shows the poet at every stage of his development, acting upon, and reacting to, people and events. Holmes lays great emphasis on the politics, philosophy and social activities of Shelley.

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes’s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain’s greatest poets.

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** **Time Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013** **The New Republic Best Books of 2013** In this heart-lifting chronicle, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell. His accounts of the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar are dramatic and exhilarating. Holmes documents as well the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher (who rose) seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology); and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work. A seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography, and the metaphysics of flights, Falling Upwards explores the interplay between technology and imagination. And through the strange allure of these great balloonists, it offers a masterly portrait of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision. (With 24 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

Based on the letters and diaries of the British soldiers who served as the backbone of the army from 1760 to 1860, this illuminating book is rich in the history of a fascinating era. of illustrations.

With this collection of short and fascinating biographical pieces, the award-winning biographer of Coleridge and Shelley offers a fascinating glimpse into the mysterious art of biography. When researching, Richard Holmes has often become captivated by figures peripheral to his main subject, literary forays that he couldn’t resist. These tales–the forbidden love of John Stuart Mill, the bizarre novel of Oscar Wilde’s tragic grand-uncle, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s nightmarish yet cathartic final trip to Paris–are part of what comprises Sidetracks, a marvelously original that includes letters and travelogues, radio plays, essays, and minature biographies. This book is a rare literary feast and an exploration of the creative processes of one of our most preeminent biographers.

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes''s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain''s greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes''s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of ''Kubla Khan'' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes''s Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge''s poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject''s personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes''s Falling Upwards.

Captions and descriptions supplement photographs from the archives of London''s Imperial War Museum, showing various aspects of the war and its impact.

Sahib is a magnificent history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of Empire, making full use of personal accounts from the soldiers who served in the jewel in Britain’s Imperial Crown.

"Richard Holme''s exhilarating biography paints the portrait of the man, warts and all, who was as tenacious and brilliant on the battlefield as he was treacherous, greedy and passionate in his personal life, and who, in the end, became saviour of the Holy Roman Empire."--BOOK JACKET.

Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes’s classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets.

One of the most admired political leaders of all time, Winston Churchill remains an icon four decades after his death. Here, the eminent military historian Richard Holmes offers a remarkable reappraisal of Churchill by examining the early influences that shaped his character. Drawing on sources such as letters between the young Churchill and his parents, Holmes paints the most complete portrait to date of the man who stood up to Hitler and led his people to victory against all odds. From his aristocratic birth to a brilliant but flawed father and a famously beautiful mother, through his struggles at school and his adventures as a cavalry officer in India and the Sudan, Churchill''s extraordinary character is richly illuminated in this vivid biography.

This wide-ranging and exhaustively researched book is an attempt to grasp the very nature of war. It takes us through the soldier''s experience in its entirety - from the humiliation of basic training and the intense comradeship of army life, to the terror, isolation and exhaustion of battle.

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes''s thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still.

Richard Holmes, military historian and broadcaster, here tells the story of Britain''s greatest-ever soldier, the man who posed the most serious threat to Napoleon. Holmes charts the Duke of Wellington''s stellar military career from India to Europe, and in the process, rediscovers the reasons Queen Victoria called him the greatest man the 19th century had produced. Combining his historical analysis with a semi-biographical examination of Wellington, Holmes illustrates the rapid evolution in military and political thinking of the time.

In this compelling book, Richard Holmes tells the exhilarating story of the Duke of Wellington, Britain''s greatest ever soldier.

This wide-ranging and incisive study of the military experience draws an astonishing picture of what motivates the soldier to struggle in conditions of physical and mental degradation. It reveals the humiliation of basic training, the attitude to fear, the drive for sex and loot, the elixir of comradeship.

Napoleon was the colossus of his age. He rose to become one of Revolutionary France''s most successful generals, before being crowned emperor in December 1804. This book tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, bringing 30 items of facsimile memorabilia, which have been researched from museum collections around the world.

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 author’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 lifetime’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 Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. 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 Holmes’s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit—and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insider’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.

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In The Transcendence of the World, Richard Holmes brings together some of the major figures in the phenomenological movement to help explain our experience of the world—the world meant as independent of any particular awareness of it. Focussing on the writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Holmes delivers an accessible and coherent account of both the method and results of phenomenological analysis. He offers a critical appraisal of the works of these great thinkers and presents his own radical analyses in order to make sense of our experience of the world, and also the theory of quantum mechanics that purports to describe this world. This book will be an important resource for students and scholars of philosophy and for all those interested in twentieth-century continental ideas.

Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, Tommy is the first history of World War I to place the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage.

In 1719, sixteen families left Ireland for America and founded a community called Nutfield, which evolved into modern Derry. For centuries, Derry retained its small-town character, but the 1963 opening of Interstate 93 changed the town forever. Within a decade, its population doubled. Derry is now the states most populous town. This charming collection of over two hundred photographs presents Derry in its quieter years, when trolleys crisscrossed the town, most of the men worked in shoe factories, and traffic on Broadway stopped each morning as the Hood cows crossed to their pasture. For many older residents, these images will bring back a flood of memories. Newcomers will better understand the traditions that helped shape the town. Derry Revisited evokes a sense of expanded pride in the heritage of Derry.

From the impact of the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, to the problems of military uncertainty and the role of women in combat, this collection of essays explores the changing face of militarism from the perspective of defence management experts.

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes''s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain''s greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes''s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of "Kubla Khan" and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes''s Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge''s poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject''s personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, and the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.