Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit (published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award; Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works include Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

From the Review

April 12, 2007: The Passionate Partnership

The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge by Adam Sisman

February 27, 2003: The Romantic Pugilist

September 20, 2001: Triumph of an Artist

A Life of James Boswell by Peter Martin

Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman

June 10, 1999: Good News! (letter)

April 22, 1999: Lost Tale of a Lost Child

Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot by Mary Shelley, edited with an introduction by Claire Tomalin

July 17, 1997: Paradise in a Dream

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

April 10, 1997: The Romantic Circle

November 30, 1995: Voltaire's Grin

June 8, 1995: On the Enchanted Hill

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson 1854–1890 edited by Bradford A. Booth, edited by Ernest Mehew

Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Frank McLynn

Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny by Alexandra Lapierre, translated by Carol Cosman

May 12, 1994: Lord of Unreason

Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E.P. Thompson

November 19, 1992: Not a Drummer (letter)

September 24, 1992: 'He Doth Not Sleep'

The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views edited by G. Kim Blank

Shelley's Poetry and Prose edited by Donald H. Reiman, edited by Sharon B. Powers

The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts Volume XI: The Geneva Notebook of Percy Bysshe Shelley transcribed and edited by Michael Erkelenz

Shelley's First Love: The Love Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Harriet Grove by Desmond Hawkins

Love's Children by Judith Chernaik

Shelley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

October 24, 1991: Closing the Goethe Gap

Goethe: The Poet and the Age Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790) by Nicholas Boyle

June 27, 1991: The Cabinet of Doctor Keats

Romantic Medicine and John Keats by Hermione de Almeida

From New York Review Books

My Fantoms The famed biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, Richard Holmes, compiles fantastical stories of love and death and from France's leading Romantic, friend of Hugo, and dedicatee of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. "It is in Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the the unreal world...[it] is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound."—H.P. Lovecraft

Shelley: The Pursuit Here we have the real Shelley at last—radical agitator, atheist, and apostle of free love, as well as a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator.

Books by Richard Holmes

Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (2002)
Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000)
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 (1999)
The Romantic Poets and Their Circle (1997)
Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (1993)
Coleridge: Early Visions (1989)
Shelley; The Pursuit (1974)
One for Sorrow, Two for Joy (1970)