Ричард Холмс - электронные книги

Lives that Never Grow OldPart of a radical series –edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Johnson’s book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.When he first came to London, young Samuel Johnson was befriended by the flamboyant poet, playwright and blackmailer, Richard Savage. Walking the backstreets at night, he learned Savage’s extraordinary story – supposedly persecuted by a ‘cruel mother’, sentenced to death for a murder in a brothel, appointed Volunteer Poet Laureate to the Queen, and finally broken and outcast.With this moving and intimate account, Johnson created a brilliant black comedy of 18th-century Grub Street which revolutionised English biography by its psychological realism. Yet Savage’s destructive charm and delusions of grandeur sometimes even threatened to entangle Johnson himself.

Richard Holmes, highly acclaimed military historian and broadcaster, tells the exhilarating story of Britain’s greatest-ever soldier, the man who posed the most serious threat to Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington’s remarkable life and extraordinary campaigns are recreated with Holmes’ superb skill in this compelling book.Richard Holmes charts Wellington’s stellar military career from India to Europe, and in the process, rediscovers the reasons Queen Victoria called him the greatest man the nineteenth century had produced. Combining his astute historical analysis with a semi-biographical examination of Wellington, Holmes artfully illustrates the rapid evolution in military and political thinking of the time.Wellington is a brilliant figure, idealistic in politics, cynical in love, a wit, a beau, a man of enormous courage often sickened by war. As Richard Holmes charts his progress from a shy, indolent boy to commander-in-chief of the allied forces, he also exposes the Iron Duke as a philanderer, and a man who sometimes despised the men that he led, and was not always in control of his soldiers. Particularly infamous is the bestial rampage of his men after the capture of Cuidad Rodgrigo and Badajoz.THE IRON DUKE is a beautifully produced book, complete with stunning illustrations and colour plates. Richard Holmes’ TV series to accompany THE IRON DUKE will be lavishly constructed in four parts, and filmed on location in Britain, India, Spain, Portugal, France and Belgium.

(This edition includes a limited number of illustrations.)‘Redcoat is a wonderful book. It is not just a work of history – but one of enthusiasm and unparalleled knowledge.' BERNARD CORNWELL‘Redcoat is a wonderful book. It is not just a work of history – but one of enthusiasm and unparalleled knowledge.' BERNARD CORNWELLRedcoat is the story of the British soldier from c.1760 until c.1860 – surely one of the most enduring and magnetic subjects of the British past. Solidly based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them, the book is rich in the history of the period. It charts Wolfe's victory and death at Quebec, the American War of Independence, the Duke of York's campaign in Flanders, Wellington's Peninsular War, Waterloo,the retreat from Kabul, the Sikh wars in 1845-9, the Crimean war and the Indian Mutiny.The focus of Redcoat, however, is the individual recollection and experience of the ordinary soldiers serving in the wars fought by Georgian and early Victorian England.Through their stories and anecdotes – of uniforms, equipment,'taking the King's shilling', flogging, wounds, food, barrack life, courage, comradeship, death, love and loss – Richard Holmes provides a comprehensive portrait of a fallible but extraordinarily successful fighting force.'Such a scene of mortal strife from the fire of fifty men was never witnessed…' writes Harry Smith of the 95th Rifles, recounting the death of a brother officer in Spain in 1813. 'I wept over his remains with a bursting heart as, with his company who adored him, I consigned to the grave the last external appearance of Daniel Cadoux. His fame can never die.' Smith's account is typical of the emotions and experiences of the men who appear on every page of this book, sporting their red uniforms to fight for King and country.

(This edition includes a limited number of illustrations.)From celebrated military historian Richard Holmes, bestselling author of ‘Tommy’ and ‘Redcoat’, the rich history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of empire.‘Sahib’ is a broad and sweeping military history of the British soldier in India, but its focus, like that of Tommy and Redcoat before it, will be on the men who served in India and the women who followed them across that vast and dusty continent, bore their children, and, all too often, mopped their brows as they died.The book begins with the remarkable story of India's rise from commercial enclave to great Empire, from Clive’s victory of Plassey, through the imperial wars of the 18th-century and the Afghan and Sikh Wars of the 1840s, through the bloody turmoil of the Mutiny, and the frontier campaigns at the century’s end. With its focus on the experience of ordinary soldiers, ‘Sahib’ explains to us why soldiers of the Raj had joined the army, how they got to India and what they made of it when they arrived. The book examines Indian soldiering in peace and war, from Kipling’s ‘snoring barrack room’ to storming parties assaulting mighty fortresses, cavalry swirling across open plains, and khaki columns inching their way between louring hills. Making full use of extensive and often neglected archive material in the India Office Library and National Army Museum, ‘Sahib’ will do for the British soldier in India – whether serving a local ruler, forming part of the Indian army, or soldiering with a British regiment – what ‘Tommy’ has done for the ordinary soldier in World War I.

Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes’s classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets.Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge transforms our view of the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ forever. Holmes’s Coleridge leaps out of these pages as the brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking poet of genius that he was.This second volume covers the last 30 years of Coleridge’s career (1804-1834) during which he travelled restlessly through the Mediterranean, returned to his old haunts in the Lake District and the West Country, and finally settled in Highgate. It was a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage broke up, his opium addiction increased, he quarrelled with Wordsworth, his own son Hartley Coleridge (a gifted poet himself) became an alcoholic. And after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge re-emerged on the literary scene as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDPart of a radical series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Gilchrist’s ‘The Life of William Blake’ is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.This was the first biography of William Blake ever written, at a time when the great visionary poet and painter was generally forgotten, ridiculed or dismissed as insane. Wonderfully vivid and outspoken (one chapter is entitled ‘Mad or Not Mad’), it was based on revealing interviews with many of Blake’s surviving friends.Blake conversed with spirits, saw angels in trees, and sunbathed naked with his wife ‘like Adam and Eve’. Gilchrist adds detailed descriptions of Blake’s beliefs and working methods, an account of his trial for high treason and fascinating evocations of the places in London, Kent and Sussex where he lived. The book ultimately transformed and enhanced Blake’s reputation.

Bestselling military historian Richard Holmes delivers an expertly written and exhilarating account of the life of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough and Britain's finest soldier, who rose from genteel poverty to lead his country to glory, cementing its position as a major player on the European stage and saviour of the Holy Roman Empire.

John Churchill is, by any reasonable analysis, Britain’s greatest-ever soldier. He mastered strategy, tactics and logistics. His big four battles, Blenheim (which saved the Holy Roman Empire), Ramilies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet were events at the very centre of the European stage. He captured Lille, France’s second city, overran Bavaria and beat a succession of French marshals so badly that one, the squat and energetic Bofflers, was rewarded by Louis XIV for only losing moderately.

A coalition manager long before the phrase was invented, he commanded a huge polyglot army with centrifugal political tendencies and bending it to his will by sheer force of personality.

Yet John Churchill was also deeply controversial. He accepted a pension from one of Charles II’s mistresses for services vigorously rendered. He owed his rise and his peerage to James II yet, determined to be on the winning side, he deserted him in his hour of need in 1688. He maintained regular correspondence with the Jacobites while serving William and Mary and with the French while fighting Louis XIV. He made money on a prodigious scale, but was notoriously tight-fisted, long regretting an annuity given to a secretary whose quick-wittedness saved him from capture. But in the age when commissions were bought and sold, and commanders often owed their position to the hue of their blood, he never lost his soldier’s confidence.

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDThis unique series – edited by Richard Holmes – recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece – still thrilling to read and vividly alive.The philosopher William Godwin fell in love with and married the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, only to attend her deathbed (giving birth to their child, the late Mary Shelley). Heartbroken, Godwin immediately shut himself up in his study and wrote this intensely moving biography.True to his philosophical belief in absolute sincerity, Godwin coolly describes Wollstonecraft’s previous love affairs, her time in revolutionary Paris, her illegitimate child, and her two suicide attempts. The book almost wrecked both their reputations, but can now be seen as a masterpiece of indiscretion and human honesty.

A magisterial new history of the British soldier – a man famously described by the Duke of Wellington as ‘the scum of the earth’. From battlefield to barrack-room, this book is stuffed to the brim with anecdotes and stories of soldiers from the army of Charles II, through Empire and two World Wars to modern times.

The British soldier forms a core component of British history. In this scholarly but gossipy book, Richard Holmes presents a rich social history of the man (and now more frequently woman) who have been at the heart of his writing for decades.

Technological, political and social changes have all made their mark on the development of warfare, but have the attitudes of the soldier shifted as much we might think?

For Holmes, the soldier is part of a unique tribe – and the qualities of loyalty and heroism have continued to grow amongst these men. And while today the army constitutes the smallest proportion of the population since the first decade of its existence (regular soldiers make up just 0.087%), the social organisation of the men has hardly changed; the major combat arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery, have retained much of the forms that men who fought at Blenheim, Waterloo and the Somme would readily grasp.

Regiments remain an enduring feature of the army and Lieutenant Colonels have lost nothing of their importance in military hierarchy; the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe in Afghanistan in 2009 shows just how high the risks are that these men continue to face.

Filled to the brim with stories from all over the world and spanning across history, this magisterial book conveys how soldiers from as far back as the seventeenth century and soldiers today are united by their common experiences.

Richard Holmes died suddenly, soon after completing this book. It is his last word on the British soldier – about which he knew and wrote so much.

In the ebook version of the classic, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical stories that have captured his fancy in the course of researching his books on the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.‘Sidetracks' is a sister book to 'Footsteps', conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies like Shelley and Coleridge. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever.'The centerpiece of book concerns Mary Woolstonecraft, the great feminist crusader and philosopher, and her relationship with William Godwin. Their story and travails are inspiring and poignant, all told in riveting and beautiful prose style.'Sidetracks' winds through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities: some French, some English, some Dutch, some American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and Gautier, Pierrot and Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, James Boswell and Zelide, MR James and some very unpleasant gothic apparitions.With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The book includes two documentary radio-plays, many different kinds of character sketch and travelogue, true love stories and true ghost stories, and one piece, 'Dr Johnson's First Cat' which may or may not be a piece of true biographical fiction.'Sidetracks' is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated Holmes.

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDA radical new series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.This short, brilliant, action-packed biography appeared only eight years after Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar (a scene unforgettably described). It helped transform Nelson into the most popular wartime hero that Britain has ever placed on top of a column.It first gave currency to the proverbial stories of his courage and exhibitionism, from the ‘blind eye’ at Copenhagen, to ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ and the scandal of ‘Beloved Emma’ at Naples. It was written by the romantic poet and historian Robert Southey, a one-time radical who was converted to patriotism by Nelson’s shining (though not ‘untarnished’) example.

‘When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them.’In this, only her second book, Penelope Fitzgerald turned her novelist’s gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers. A masterly work of biography, within which we see Penelope Fitzgerald exercising her pen magnificently before she began her novel-writing career.Edmund Knox, her father, was one of the most successful editors of Punch. Dillwyn, a Cambridge Greek scholar, was the first to crack the Nazi’s message decoding system, Enigma, and in so doing, is estimated to have shortened the Second World War by six months. Wilfred became an Anglo-Catholic priest and an active welfare worker in the East End of London. Ronald, the best known of the four during his lifetime, was Roman Catholic chaplain to Oxford University’s student body, preacher, wit, scholar, crime-writer and translator of the Bible.A homage to a long-forgotten world and a fascinating account of the generation straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian.

Across three centuries, and much of Europe – “Holmes writes beautifully… A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ The OldieIn this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime’s obsession with his Romantic subjects. This pursuit has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.Central to this quest 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 myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favourite Romantics: 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.The diversity of Holmes’s material is testimony to his empathy, erudition and enquiring spirit; and at times his mischievous streak. This Long Pursuit contains Richard Holmes’s most personal and seductive writing yet.

Part of the outstanding biographical series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.In this pioneering series, Richard Holmes, the world’s leading Romantic biographer, sets out to recover the great forgotten tradition of English biographical writing. ‘I have had no time for dusty tomes,’ writes Holmes, ‘I have looked for brevity, intelligence and style. Above all, I have sought out great biographical writers: biographers with passion, biographers who have found a way to the heart and soul of a memorable subject.’Jack Sheppard was an 18th-century Houdini – a handsome young escape artist who broke out of his cell on Newgate’s grim Death Row three times. Jonathan Wild was the infamous Thief-Taker General who helped to recapture him and many other criminals, only to be tried and executed himself for racketeering, among scenes of mayhem at Tyburn.Daniel Defoe, the master of adventure fiction, was fascinated by ‘True Confessions’ and the workings of the criminal personality (including its daring, its stoicism and its humour). He was the first to retell these stories, based on personal interviews in Newgate, which also include a thrilling (sometimes hour by hour) reconstruction of events.