Most Popular Books by Richard Holmes

The book is a pictorial history of Rhode Island''s thirty-one lighthouses and two lightships stations. There are over 200 photographs in the book, including rare views of Gould Island Lighthouse, Nayatt Point Lighthouse and Point Judith Lighthouse. There are plans for Nayatt Point Lighthouse and Brenton Reef Lightship LV-102/WAL 525.

The first volume of Richard Holmes''s two-volume biography of Coleridge, which won the 1989 Whitbread Prize for book of the year and which transforms our view of this greatest of Romantic poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of a major new biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge which will transform 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 the poetry, Coleridge''s 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.

Interest in the greatest military conflict of all time has never been stronger. Written by leading military historian Richard Holmes, the book presents the photographs in year-by-year chapters, covering every theatre of operations. Dramatic, hard hitting and intensely moving, this is a unique visual testament to the millions of men and women who lost their lives in the war, and a reminder to today''s generations of both the heroism and horror of global conflict.

**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.)

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes''s Falling Upwards.

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.

As one of the most admired political leaders of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill holds iconic status in popular memory. But in this incisive new biography, acclaimed military historian Richard Holmes offers a remarkable reappraisal of Churchill by examining the influences that shaped his character. Drawing upon never-before-seen materials 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. Detailing the decisive events of Churchill''s life -- from his childhood to his experiences in the Boer War through his rapid rise in politics -- Holmes demonstrates the central role Churchill''s character played in the key decisions of his public life. With an already inflated sense of self, Churchill had several lucky escapes in combat -- in the Boer War and in the trenches of WWI -- convincing him that he was saved for a reason and was destined for greatness. In the Footsteps of Churchill uncovers a surprisingly different Churchill -- both admirable and difficult -- through the lens of his character.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

More than any other town in New Hampshire, Derry has changed dramatically over the last thirty years. Gone are the fields, the forests, and the fine old homes, and in their place stand malls, modern housing developments, and multi-lane highways. It is difficult now to imagine the scene in 1719 when a small group of Scottish pioneers laid claim to the New Hampshire wilderness, building a meetinghouse close to a young oak tree. The town of Derry grew up around this site, and for nearly ten generations the oak stood as a respected presence within the community, symbolizing Derry''s strength of purpose and proud traditions.

Written by one of Britain s best known and most respected military historians, "The D-Day Experience"graphically captures the planning and execution of the Allied invasion, which ultimately led to victory. More than 30 facsimile items of rare memorabilia thrust readers right into the heart of history: they ll have the unique opportunity to relive this momentous event by holding and examining facsimiles of rarely or never-seen maps, diaries, letters, secret memos and reports, posters and logbooks. Many of these have, up until now, remained filed or exhibited only behind glass in the Imperial War Museum and other collections worldwide."Memorabilia highlights include: "U.S. Airborne secret maps showing drop zone from parachutist''s eye viewOmaha Beach Intelligence message book with minute-by-minute reportsGerman radio signal log at 4:15 am on D-Day which reads " Thousands of ships tracked. They re coming. "The Wednesday, June 7, 1944, edition of Stars and StripesGold Beach Infantryman''s handwritten diary from June 4June 17, 1944, describing landings, the move inland, and battlefield promotion.Propaganda leaflets dropped on Allied troops by night-flying German pilotsJuno Beach Canadian infantryman''s letter written to his wife on the Channel crossing on the eve of D-Day. He survived D-Day but was killed later in Holland.And more "

Here is an exciting and informative guide to the most important battles in history.

The World at War is the definitive television work on the Second World War. It set out to tell the story of the war through the testimony of key participants - from civilians to ordinary soldiers, from statesmen to generals. First broadcast in 1973, the result was a unique and irreplaceable record since many of the eyewitnesses captured on film did not have long to live.The programme''s producers committed hundreds of interview-hours to tape in its creation, but only a fraction of that material made it to the final cut. For more than 30 years the interviews have never been allowed to be published - until now.Highly respected historian and bestselling author Richard Holmes has skilfully woven this valuable original material into a compelling narrative, creating a truly phenomenal oral history of the Second World War.

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.

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.

Sir John French is a figure who has always aroused controversy. unsurpassed. Despite being the most capable cavalry leader of his generation, posterity has judged him an unfeeling butcher, responsible for more deaths in the first two hours of the battle of Loos than all the casualties on both sides in the 1944 D-Day landings. But there was another side to French, which is only revealed in his private papers. scandalous: he courted dismissal after an affair with a fellow officer''s wife, and had a string of beautiful and well-connected mistresses. tormented by what he termed ''glory and her twin sister murder''. as he envisaged his room at GHQ filled with the ''silent army'' of the dead. In the writing of this book, the first and only comprehensive biography of the Field Marshal, Richard Holmes was granted unrestricted access to Sir John French''s private papers. of the most important military events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A magisterial new history of the British soldier - a man famously described by the Duke of Wellington as ''the scum of the earth''. From battlefield to barrack-room, this book is stuffed to the brim with anecdotes and stories of soldiers from the army of Charles II, through Empire and two World Wars to modern times. The British soldier forms a core component of British history. In this scholarly but gossipy book, Richard Holmes presents a rich social history of the man (and now more frequently woman) who have been at the heart of his writing for decades. Technological, political and social changes have all made their mark on the development of warfare, but have the attitudes of the soldier shifted as much we might think? For Holmes, the soldier is part of a unique tribe - and the qualities of loyalty and heroism have continued to grow amongst these men. And while today the army constitutes the smallest proportion of the population since the first decade of its existence (regular soldiers make up just 0.087%), the social organisation of the men has hardly changed; the major combat arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery, have retained much of the forms that men who fought at Blenheim, Waterloo and the Somme would readily grasp. Regiments remain an enduring feature of the army and Lieutenant Colonels have lost nothing of their importance in military hierarchy; the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe in Afghanistan in 2009 shows just how high the risks are that these men continue to face. Filled to the brim with stories from all over the world and spanning across history, this magisterial book conveys how soldiers from as far back as the seventeenth century and soldiers today are united by their common experiences. Richard Holmes died suddenly, soon after completing this book. It is his last word on the British soldier - about which he knew and wrote so much.

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.

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.

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.