William Collins
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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