New Releases by Richard Holmes

Joseph Banks reisde mee met ontdekkingsreiziger James Cook, die in Tahiti op zoek was naar het paradijs. Ze kwamen dicht in de buurt, vooral dankzij Banks'' mensenkennis waarmee hij zelfs de lokale bevolking wist in te palmen. Jaren later is Banks de directeur van de wetenschappelijke Royal Society en geeft hij de ruimte aan de eerste generatie moderne wetenschappers. Holmes volgt astronoom William Herschel en scheikundige Humphry Davy, geïnspireerde figuren die in hun werk op zoek waren naar schoonheid en idealisme maar vooral naar dat ongeëvenaarde gevoel: Eureka!

80th ANNIVERSARY EDITION Produced in collaboration with Imperial War Museums Relive the day that changed the course of history. On 6 June 1944, D-Day marked the beginning of a campaign that involved more than a million men and helped seal the fate of Hitler''s Germany. Written by esteemed military historian Richard Holmes and including rare documents, diaries and secret memos from the archives of the Imperial War Museums, D-Day Remembered details the planning, execution and aftermath of the most momentous event of the Second World War.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1845.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1845.

"Di per sè, una meraviglia" THE GUARDIAN Gli scienziati di cui questo libro racconta le vicende straordinarie si chiamavano ancora filosofi naturali. Non avevano cattedre né prebende, e poteva accadere che per guadagnarsi da vivere si imbarcassero sull’Endeavour di un certo Cook, col compito di raccogliere e catalogare esemplari di fauna e flora esotiche, sempre che tempeste e popolazioni non proprio bendisposte li lasciassero prendere terra. O che nel tempo libero, insieme a una sorella molto devota, costruissero un telescopio sul tetto di casa per provare a calcolare il numero esatto delle stelle esistenti. E poteva essere che nel buio delle notti d’inverno scoprissero pianeti dove nessuno sospettava esistessero, lasciando ad altri il compito di chiamarli Urano, Titania o Encelado. Joseph Banks e William Herschel sono solo due fra gli eroi – di volta in volta colossali e minuscoli, spesso irresistibilmente comici – cui Richard Holmes ha dedicato questo libro. Che è un esperimento felice e avventuroso come quelli che racconta, e istiga nel lettore il migliore dei sentimenti che una storia possa trasmettere: l’invidia per i suoi personaggi.

Tras años de carencias o altibajos, la biografía de nuevo está en alza. Este género todoterreno ha demostrado su capacidad de evolucionar y sobrevivir a modas historiográficas, imperativos comerciales, fronteras culturales e incluso ideologías y censuras políticas. Quizá porque sus sujetos de estudio seres humanos braceando en su torrente vital e histórico constituyen una fuente de atracción y aprendizaje continuo que, además, es irreductible a leyes. En este libro se integran voces de distintas nacionalidades y especialidades; hombres y mujeres, jóvenes y veteranos, que exploran y desvelan las rutas generales del viaje biográfico o narran los vericuetos del suyo propio. Lo hacen desde ámbitos académicos (literario o histórico) o desde la creación biográfica independiente. Partiendo de perspectivas y experiencias plurales, este volumen reflexiona sobre problemas y paisajes biográficos nacionales, cuestiones o personajes relevantes, vivencias personales, metodologías de la escritura de vidas e historia. En todas las contribuciones trasciende, sin embargo, un fondo común: una pasión por las vidas escritas. La interdisciplinariedad resulta enriquecedora y gratificante, esa pasión contagiosa.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Sketches on the Shores of the Caspian is the product of the author''s journey through the Caspian region as part of an expedition headed by his cousin James Brant, the British Consul at Erzeroum. Holmes provides a wonderfully intimate portrait of the country. Written in a very accessible style it nonetheless provides a wealth of detail on the towns, the climate, trade, military, people and culture as well as valuable information on the Russian presence in the region at the time. This very scarce volume is here published with a new Introduction by leading scholar of Asia, Morris Rossabi, Professor of Inner Asian History, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University and Distinguished Professor of History, Queens College, The City University of New York.

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.

A fine account of the three civil war sieges of Yorkshire''s Pontefract Castle. A Royalist stronghold, the great Medieval castle was reduced to ruins after Parliament finally took it in 1648.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

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. Over the next eight years he fought a series of campaigns, defeating all his continental rivals, though his inability to take command of the sea prevented him from beating Britain. This authoritative book tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, bringing them to life as never before with eight items of rare facsimile memorabilia, which have been specially researched from museum collections around the world.

A delightful booklet of spiritual insights, miracles and revelations derived mainly from the author''s actual experiences. Richard F Holmes seems to have the knack of taking potentially complicated spiritual topics and explaining them in a very reader-friendly, easy to understand and humorous way. A must read for anyone of any age who has an interest in spirituality. All royalties from online sales of this book are being donated to The Cotswold Care Hospice For more information visit www.cotswoldcare.org.uk

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.

**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.)

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.

Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of “a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure.” Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.

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

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.

I am Soldier brings together the profiles of sixty soldiers who have fought over the past 2,500 years. These vivid accounts graphically depict the role of the soldier in battle often using the soldiers'' own words to reveal what they felt during the chaos of war and its aftermath. From the Spartans at Thermopylae to the war in the Persian Gulf, this book shows the lives of the individual men and woman who made up the great armies that changed the world.

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.

''This is the room from which I will direct the war,'' Churchill declared, shortly after becoming Prime Minister in 1940. It was from these cramped confines that Churchill turned a seemingly inevitable defeat at the hands of the Nazis into a famous victory. Built in 1938 as a temporary refuge in case of air raid attack, this secret bunker became a second home to Churchill - and to large numbers of military personnel and civil servants whose work until now has been largely unsung. Drawing on a fascinating range of original material, including newly available first-hand accounts of the people who lived there, Holmes reveals how and why the bunker and its war machine developed; how the inhabitants'' lives were transformed; and how their work led to victory. Elegant and illuminating, Churchill''s Bunker is a unique exploration of one of the most important sites in British history.

A classic reissue of Richard Holmes’s brilliant book on Samuel Johnson’s friendship with the poet Richard Savage, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

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.

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.

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.

“This is the room from which I will direct the war,” Churchill declared upon seeing the dank storage basement in an improbably central location near the Houses of Parliament. The chambers would become his base of operations during the heaviest enemy bombardment of London. In Churchill’s Bunker, distinguished Churchill biographer Richard Holmes provides the first comprehensive history of the Cabinet War Rooms, from which Churchill managed to turn a seemingly inevitable defeat at the hands of the Nazis into a victory for the free world. Here was the Map Room that charted the advances and retreats of armies, the locations of warships, and the often painful progress of the convoys that kept the nation supplied with munitions. Here the planners worked on future operations and the intelligence staff pondered the enemy’s next moves. And remarkably, all of this highly charged work was known only to those who needed to know. Drawing on a wealth of original material, including new firsthand accounts of the people who lived and worked there, Holmes reveals how and why the bunker and its war machine developed, how life was conducted in a realm where “only the clock told whether it was night or day and . . . an electric bell gave warning of an air-raid,” and how Churchill interacted with his staff in very close quarters. A unique exploration of the calculus of secrecy during the Second World War, Churchill’s Bunker provides an intimate portrait of Churchill and his closest advisors in one of the most fascinating and underexplored venues of twentieth-century history.