Falling upwards - Richard Holmes - Pantheon

Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA (born 5 November 1945) is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. Holmes's major works of Romantic biography include: Shelley: The Pursuit which won him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, which won him the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize (now the Costa Book Awards); Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the second and final volume of his Coleridge biography which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award; and Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, concerning the friendship between eighteenth-century British literary figures Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, which won the James Tait Black Prize. Holmes is also the author of two studies of European biography. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer is a highly acclaimed volume of memoirs and personal reflections on the biographer's art and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer collects his shorter pieces, including an early, groundbreaking essay on Thomas Chatterton and an introductory account of the lives and works of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

He is editor of the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies, launched in 2004. His 2005 monograph on biography and portraiture for the National Portrait Gallery, Insights: The Romantic Poets and their Circle, was unusual in that it included scientists alongside literary writers. He has also written many drama-documentaries for BBC Radio, most recently The Frankenstein Experiment (2002), and A Cloud in a Paper Bag (2007) about 18th century balloon mania. October 2008 saw his first major work of biography in over a decade, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, published by HarperPress. In it he explores the scientific ferment that swept across Britain at the end of 18th century. Holmes proposes a radical vision of science before Charles Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. The book received wide review coverage (see below), was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week and became a best-seller. In Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2013), Holmes approaches the history of ballooning by presenting biographies of French, English, and American balloonists. The personalities and experiences of those involved are varied and surprising. Balloons were used successfully to send information out of besieged Paris in 1870, and unsuccessfully to fly to the North Pole in the 1890s, to name only two examples. In Holmes' history of ballooning, science meets showmanship and both literary flights and actual adventures capture the imagination. wiki/Richard_Holmes

"An extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment." --The Wall Street Journal "Out of an ostensibly placid, dreamy activity . . . Holmes conjures an extraordinarily vivid, violent, thrilling history, full of bizarre personalities, narrow escapes and fatal plunges." --Time "No writer alive writes better about the past than Holmes. . . . The stories are remarkable." --The New York Times Book Review "Holmes has a rare and infectious capacity for wonderment. . . . He tells his balloon stories with inimitable zest. . . . A heady, swoopingly aerodynamic book." --The Observer (UK) "Holmes's writing is a carnival of historical delights; at every turn there is a surprise. . . . He sneaks the whole trajectory of mankind into three hundred and fifty pages." --The New Yorker.com "Enthralling, picaresque history. . . . Holmes cuts his thrilling set-pieces with haunting images. . . . Appropriately, his prose is lighter than air, elegantly traversing aviators and eras. It means that as his balloonists embark on journeys full of danger and wonder the reader is suspended in the basket alongside them." --Financial Times "The book that gave me the most unadulterated delight this year. . . . The book is nominally a history of the hot air balloon, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a history of hope and fantasy--and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight." --Chloe Schama, The New Republic "Holmes' passion for the topic comes through in this rich and often entertaining chronicle of intrepid vertical explorers who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives lifting human flight out of the realm of mythology and into the air." --Discover "Holmes is a charming and impassioned guide. . . . His prose often reaches a moving pitch." --Newsday "Holmes' love for the balloon . . . is obvious. . . . A fine addition to his already extraordinary oeuvre." --Cleveland Plain Dealer "A book as delightful as it is unexpected, one that is a testament to the sheer pleasures of writing about what you know, about what excites you and what gives you joy. And what more joyous a topic than the hilarious insanities of 'Falling upwards'!" --The Wall Street Journal "Gripping. . . . Meticulous history illuminated and animated by personal passion, carried aloft by volant prose." --Kirkus "A full-blown, lyrical history . . . investigating the strangeness, detachment and powerful romance of 'falling upwards' into a seemingly alien and uninhabitable element. . . . Holmes is a truly masterly storyteller ." --London Evening Standard "The human drama...is marvelously handled. . . . Holmes has made a subtle and captivating whole of this series of aerial adventures." --Times Literary Supplement (London) "A captivating and surely definitive history of the madness of pre-Wright brothers ballooning." --The Times (London), Book of the Week "Endlessly exhilarating. . . . Packed full of swashbuckling stories. . . . A singularly beautiful book, quite clearly a product of love." --Mail on Sunday (UK) "The delight [of] the author . . . carries over to the reader. Above all what Holmes teases out . . . is the very interesting idea that ballooning gave us, quite literally, a different point of view [and] a wholly novel experience of sublimity. This exhilarating book, wonderfully written, generously illustrated and beautifully published, captures all that and more." --The Spectator amazon/Falling-Upwards-How-Took-Air

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