'An enchanting mixture of biography and memoir by the writer who has done more than any to illuminate biography's genome project - mapping, without confusing, the complex chemistry of subject and quest.' - Alan Judd, Daily Telegraph 'A delightfully eccentric volume that Boswell would have adored and Johnson well understood.' - Robert McCrum, Observer 'The shimmering sensuality of his prose, his ability to make landscape live and his touching honesty gives his writing the power and pace of good fiction.' - Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Telegraph 'This is magically compelling storytelling, set in a time of poets and phantoms, of ghosts and the Grand Guignol.' - Iain Finlayson, The Times 'Above all, Holmes is a storyteller, transforming desiccated history into literary flesh and blood. He transports the reader alongside him into the past. This book is a masterful study of the human heart - his, yours, mine - demonstrating that, in the right hands, biography can be the most dazzling literary form of all.' - Sara Wheeler, Daily Telegraph 'Nothing can detract from the substance, elegance and unshowy cleverness of his writing, on Voltaire, on Shelley, John Stuart Mill, the Lisle letters - on anything that engages Holmes's very uncommon sense.' - Claire Harman, Evening Standard

Richard Holmes is our greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Footsteps (1985) revolutionized the way biography was thought about and written. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. His portrait of the friendship between Dr Johnson and Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. The concluding volume of his Coleridge biography won the Duff Cooper Prize and the William Heinemann award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy, and lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.