Best Selling Books by Richard Holmes

''This is the room from which I will direct the war,'' Churchill declared, shortly after becoming Prime Minister in 1940. It was from these cramped confines that Churchill turned a seemingly inevitable defeat at the hands of the Nazis into a famous victory. Built in 1938 as a temporary refuge in case of air raid attack, this secret bunker became a second home to Churchill - and to large numbers of military personnel and civil servants whose work until now has been largely unsung. Drawing on a fascinating range of original material, including newly available first-hand accounts of the people who lived there, Holmes reveals how and why the bunker and its war machine developed; how the inhabitants'' lives were transformed; and how their work led to victory. Elegant and illuminating, Churchill''s Bunker is a unique exploration of one of the most important sites in British history.

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes''s thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes''s Falling Upwards.

As one of the most admired political leaders of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill holds iconic status in popular memory. But in this incisive new biography, acclaimed military historian Richard Holmes offers a remarkable reappraisal of Churchill by examining the influences that shaped his character. Drawing upon never-before-seen materials such as letters between the young Churchill and his parents, Holmes paints the most complete portrait to date of the man who stood up to Hitler and led his people to victory against all odds. Detailing the decisive events of Churchill''s life -- from his childhood to his experiences in the Boer War through his rapid rise in politics -- Holmes demonstrates the central role Churchill''s character played in the key decisions of his public life. With an already inflated sense of self, Churchill had several lucky escapes in combat -- in the Boer War and in the trenches of WWI -- convincing him that he was saved for a reason and was destined for greatness. In the Footsteps of Churchill uncovers a surprisingly different Churchill -- both admirable and difficult -- through the lens of his character.

Based on the letters and diaries of the British soldiers who served as the backbone of the army from 1760 to 1860, this illuminating book is rich in the history of a fascinating era. of illustrations.

Sahib is a magnificent history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of Empire, making full use of personal accounts from the soldiers who served in the jewel in Britain’s Imperial Crown.

This wide-ranging and exhaustively researched book is an attempt to grasp the very nature of war. It takes us through the soldier''s experience in its entirety - from the humiliation of basic training and the intense comradeship of army life, to the terror, isolation and exhaustion of battle.

In The Transcendence of the World, Richard Holmes brings together some of the major figures in the phenomenological movement to help explain our experience of the world—the world meant as independent of any particular awareness of it. Focussing on the writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Holmes delivers an accessible and coherent account of both the method and results of phenomenological analysis. He offers a critical appraisal of the works of these great thinkers and presents his own radical analyses in order to make sense of our experience of the world, and also the theory of quantum mechanics that purports to describe this world. This book will be an important resource for students and scholars of philosophy and for all those interested in twentieth-century continental ideas.

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes’s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain’s greatest poets.

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes''s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain''s greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes''s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of ''Kubla Khan'' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes''s Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge''s poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject''s personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes''s Falling Upwards.

SCOTT (copy 1): Missing title page.

A classic reissue of Richard Holmes’s brilliant book on Samuel Johnson’s friendship with the poet Richard Savage, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes’s classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets.

Ann illustrated History of men in battle.