Footsteps

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Footsteps

Richard Holmes

Biography & Memoir

Aug 1, 2018

Richard Holmes is an acclaimed biographer with a special affinity for the writers and thinkers of the Romantic era. His peerless, award-winning volumes on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge combine scholarly acumen with imaginative insight in a way that makes for riveting as well as informative reading. Holmes seems to have a natural respect for a reader’s curiosity, and his narrative gifts engage it every step of the way; it doesn’t hurt that his chosen subjects weren’t always well behaved, leading lives of notorious and fascinating variety. Footsteps is a different sort of work, a “mongrel book,” in the author’s characterization, “being part pure-bred biography, part travel, part autobiography, together with a bad dash of Baskerville Hound.” The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and entirely delightful. It would be too much to claim that the personality of the author is a match for the charisma of his subjects, yet it is Holmes’s own developing character—and his preternatural gift for weaving an engrossing tale from threads of information and intuition—that make this account of the making of a biographer an unforgettable literary excursion.

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