This Long Pursuit

<h2>‘A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ Oldie</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>