Books by Richard Holmes

'Nominally a history of the hot air balloon, 'Falling Upwards' is really a history of hope and fantasy - and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight' New Republic, Best Books of 2013

Holmes relives Napoleon's life and times in this extraordinary period by examining letters, military maps, reports, proclamations, ship's logs and coded messages, which were previously filed away or exhibited in archives in Europe.

For most British people, the First World War was the Western Front, the trench line stretching from the Swiss Frontier to the North Sea.

The retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in the early months of the First World War is one of the great dramas of European history.

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.

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.

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

Redcoat is the brilliant story of the common British soldier from 1700 to 1900, based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them.Delving into the history of the period - charting events including Wolfe's victory and death at Quebec, Wellington's Peninsular War, Waterloo, the retreat from Kabul and the Sikh wars - celebrated military historian Richard Holmes provides a comprehensive portrait of a fallible but extraordinarily successful fighting force.

The reality of what it is to be a soldier, by Britain's foremost military historian.

'Battlefields of the Second World War' is what every Richard Holmes fan has been waiting for.

From Hastings to Dunkirk, Agincourt to The Somme, Richard vividly recreates the atmosphere of these key battles in our history. There were other obvious considerations that favoured certain battles over others: battles that were particularly decisive, or ones that were well documented, or have battlefields that remain striking today.

Richard Holmes's great work of biographical exploration, published alongside its sister volume 'Sidetracks'.In 1985, Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called 'Footsteps' and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mix of travel, biographical sleuthing and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains ons of the most intoxicating, magical works of modern literary exploration ever published.Sleeping rough, he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson's famous journey through the Cevennes. Caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s, he dives back in time to the terrors of Wordsworth and of Mary Wollstonecraft marooned in Revolutionary Paris and then into the strange tortured worlds of Gerard de Nerval. Wandering through Italy, he stalks Shelley and his band of Romantic idealists to Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.