New Releases by Richard Holmes

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize • In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time. Tennyson rose to eminence as rapid and revolutionary discoveries were being made in the fields of biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science. It was a period of immense change akin to our own. For the first time, people were pursuing answers to questions that had felt previously unknowable—about biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe, and of planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. It forced many to grapple with their understanding of the known world and their place within it and fostered a growing tension between religion and science. Tennyson’s work during these years is suffused with strangely modern magic, and in Holmes’ extraordinary biography, we witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson’s wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation—and he remains an inspiration for our own age.

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Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, Tommy is the first history of World War I to place the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage.

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.

From the redcoat who served Charles II to the modern, camouflage-clad guard at Camp Bastion, from battlefield to barrack-room, this is a magisterial social history of the British soldier.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Napoleon was the colossus of his age. He rose to become one of Revolutionary France''s most successful generals, before being crowned emperor in December 1804. This book tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, bringing 30 items of facsimile memorabilia, which have been researched from museum collections around the world.

"This is the room from which I will direct the war," Churchill declared upon seeing the dank storage basement in an improbably central location near the Houses of Parliament. The chambers would become his base of operations during the heaviest enemy bombardment of London. In Churchill''s Bunker, distinguished Churchill biographer Richard Holmes provides the first comprehensive history of the Cabinet War Rooms, from which Churchill managed to turn a seemingly inevitable defeat at the hands of the Nazis into a victory for the free world. Here was the Map Room that charted the advances and retreats of armies, the locations of warships, and the often painful progress of the convoys that kept the nation supplied with munitions. Here the planners worked on future operations and the intelligence staff pondered the enemy''s next moves. And remarkably, all of this highly charged work was known only to those who needed to know. Drawing on a wealth of original material, including new firsthand accounts of the people who lived and worked there, Holmes reveals how and why the bunker and its war machine developed, how life was conducted in a realm where "only the clock told whether it was night or day and . . . an electric bell gave warning of an air-raid," and how Churchill interacted with his staff in very close quarters. A unique exploration of the calculus of secrecy during the Second World War, Churchill''s Bunker provides an intimate portrait of Churchill and his closest advisors in one of the most fascinating and underexplored venues of twentieth-century 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.

SCOTT (copy 1): Missing title page.

The book is a pictorial history of Rhode Island's thirty-one lighthouses and two lightships stations. There are over 200 photographs in the book, including rare views of Gould Island Lighthouse, Nayatt Point Lighthouse and Point Judith Lighthouse. There are plans for Nayatt Point Lighthouse and Brenton Reef Lightship LV-102/WAL 525.

A handsomely illustrated photographic account, by the bestselling author of ''Tommy'' (2003), of the human experience of war as directly witnessed by British soldiers in the First World War.

The definitive biography of Sir John French, by the increasingly famous Richard Holmes. Sir John French is a figure who has always aroused controversy. Douglas Haig despised him, while Churchill thought his leadership qualities unsurpassed. Despite being the most capable cavalry leader of his generation, posterity has judged him an unfeeling butcher, responsible for more deaths in the first two hours of the battle of Loos than all the casualties on both sides in the 1944 D-Day landings. But there was another side to French, which is only revealed in his private papers. If his public life was controversial, his private life was positively scandalous: he courted dismissal after an affair with a fellow officer''s wife, and had a string of beautiful and well-connected mistresses. And far from being the unfeeling butcher of popular myth, he was personally tormented by what he termed ''glory and her twin sister murder''. The lengthening casualty lists on the Western Front filled him with despair, as he envisaged his room at GHQ filled with the ''silent army'' of the dead.

The British Army that fought in the Great War was the first largely literate and articulate army, producing not just the celebrated war poets but also the powerful writing of the ordinary soldier. Through these unique first-hand accounts - letters, diaries and memoirs - Holmes lets the soldiers speak for themselves, brilliantly interpreting their testimony to glimpse the truth of their lives. Charting the disintegration of the Western Front, from tidy hamlets and verdant forests to a landscape as ''bare as a man''s hand'', Tommy also looks at the development of the war, examining how advances in weaponry changed the role of the soldier on the ground, how trench warfare actually worked, and the evolving chain of command.

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.

The story of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, one of Britain''s finest soldiers, both on and off the battlefield. Accompanies the BBC TV series.

Dramatic, hard hitting, and intensely moving, this book is a unique visula testament to the many millions of men and women who lost their lives in the war, and a reminder to today''s younger generations.

Skillfully clarifies the complexities of four major World War II military campaigns: El Alamein, Italy, Arnhem, and the Battle of Britain. In this study of war Holmes recreates what it was really like to be in the midst of bloody conflict from the eye-witness accounts of servicemen and women.

Ann illustrated History of men in battle.

One August morning in 1993, the military historian, Richard Holmes, nudged his heels into the flanks of his horse, Thatch, and set off with his four friends to follow the route taken by the British Expeditioary Force nearly 80 years previously, on its retreat from the German offensive at Mons. His ride took him from the Belgian border over the haunting battlefields of the First World War, across the plains and rivers of northern France, to the banks of the Marne, where in September 1914 the BEF played its part in General Joffre''s counter-attack against Von Moltke''s German armies.

The story of an unusual friendship between Samuel Johnson and the poet, playwright and convicted murderer Richard Savage.

A unique work combining military history and travel, which studies the most fought-over area on earth. De Gaulle called it a "fatal avenue" that broad sweep of low-lying country stretching north east of Paris. Over the centuries, invading armies have swept back and forth over this bloody terrain, and the names of battles fought here read like a dictionary of military history from Agincourt, Calais and Crecy to Verdun, Vimy and Ypres. Fatal Avenue is both a history and a guide a unique study of a region that has witnessed more bitter military conflict than any other area of its size on earth. From the Trade Paperback edition.