Читать онлайн «This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer»

Автор Richard Holmes

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Richard Holmes 2016

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Cover design by Heike Schüssler

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Source ISBN: 9780008168728

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008168711

Version: 2017-09-06

To Arabella Pike

my wonderful editor for more than twenty years

Contents

1

Every so often I close one of my working notebooks (there are nearly two hundred of them now, dating from 1964, the earliest in soft blue crumpled cardboard from Woolworths, the most recent in glossy black spiral-bound A5 hardback, from Black n’ Red) and begin to reflect on the whole journey, and the time left, and what if anything I have learned along the way. I look back at the highways and byways of biography, my own Footsteps and my Sidetracks, and most of all on my strange, unappeased sense of some continuous, intense and inescapable pursuit.