Knockin’ on Shelley’s Door: A Biographer’s Art-and Heart

Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer , by Richard Holmes. Pantheon, 420 pages, $30.

British biographer Richard Holmes is intimate with literature’s greats. He’s a natural gossip with an eye for detail: Shelley had a library on his doomed sailboat; Boswell thought of patenting a device that slid the sleeper out of bed automatically. He Read More