Sidetracks (Paperback, New Ed)

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.'

General

Imprint:	HarperPerennial
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	October 2005
Authors:	Richard Holmes
Dimensions:	198 x 129 x 26mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	432
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-00-720454-0
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General
LSN:	0-00-720454-X
Barcode:	9780007204540

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