This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Written by Richard Holmes

Narrated by Steven Crossley

‘A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ Oldie

In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.

Central to this pursuit is a powerful evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zélide. He investigates the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Coleridge, and the mad-visionary bard William Blake.

The diversity of Holmes’s material is testimony to his empathy, erudition and at times his mischievous streak. This is his most personal and seductive writing yet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Oct 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9780008181949

Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Reviews for This Long Pursuit

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After reading "Falling Upward" I came across a review of this work and thought it would be an interesting read. It is, but more than a coherent memoir, which the review led me to believe, it is a set of short biographies of diverse people, some famous, some not. Holmes takes the "reflections" on these lives seriously and occasionally speculates on his subjects.