Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, and editor of the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies launched in 2004. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992. His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer in 1985, and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer in 2000.
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: JIM CRACE, GUARDIAN - `A whole wide world of significance' SARAH SANDS, NEW STATESMAN - `Sheer delight' MICHAEL PRODGER, EVENING STANDARD - `Picaresque history' DAN JONES, DAILY TELEGRAPH - `Tremendously inventive' LEV GROSSMAN, TIME MAGAZINE - `Thrilling history' CHLOE SCHAMA, NEW REPUBLIC - `Unadulterated delight' KIRKUS - `Gripping' MAIL ON SUNDAY - `Tragic' `A book as delightful as it is unexpected ... [an] extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment, a book that will linger and last, as it floats ever upward in the mind' Simon Winchester, Wall Street Journal `Holmes presents a full-blown, lyrical history of the same subject, investigating the strangeness, detachment and powerful romance of `falling upwards' into a seemingly alien and uninhabitable element. He lovingly charts ... a history full of awe and inefficiency ... A truly masterly storyteller' Evening Standard `Endlessly exhilarating ... packed full of swashbuckling stories, as well as fascinating historical accounts of the use of balloons. It is also a singularly beautiful book, wonderfully designed and illustrated and quite clearly a product of love' Mail on Sunday `What Holmes teases out ... is that ballooning gave us, quite literally, a different point of view ... This exhilarating book, wonderfully written, generously illustrated and beautifully published, captures all that and more' Spectator `Holmes conjures an extraordinarily vivid, violent, thrilling history, full of bizarre personalities, narrow escapes and fatal plunges. A peerless prose artist, infectiously curious' Time Magazine