Footsteps - Adventures of a Romantic Biographer

Richard Holmess great work of biographical exploration rejacketed and republished alongside its sister volume Sidetracks. In 1985 Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called Footsteps and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mix of travel biographical sleuthing and personal memoir it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains ons of the most intoxicating magical works of modern literary exploration ever published. Sleeping rough he retraces Robert Louis Stevensons famous journey through the Cevennes. Caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s he dives back in time to the terrors of Wordsworth and of Mary Wollstonecraft marooned in Revolutionary Paris and then into the strange tortured worlds of Gerard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.