A beautifully reissued classic, a mixture of biography and memoir,
from the author of Footsteps. Sidetracks is a sister book to
Footsteps, conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the
straight and narrow' of his major biographies like Shelley and
Coleridge. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes
shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him.
Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic
assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities: some
French, some English, some Dutch, some American, some major, some
minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through
Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and Gautier,
Pierrot and Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Scott
Fitzgerald and Zelda, James Boswell and Zelide, MR James and some
very unpleasant gothic apparitions. With each of these twenty
pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful and unconstrained the many
voices of biography can be. character sketch and travelogue, true
love stories and true ghost stories, and one piece, 'Dr Johnson's
First Cat' which may or may not be a piece of true biographical
fiction.The collection is held together by a subtle
autobiographical thread, in which Holmes the Romantic biographer
writes: 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a
path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever.'
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