Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, and editor of the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies launched in 2004. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992.His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer in 1985, and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer in 2000.

‘As tense as a detective story and as rich as a Hogarth print, this is the work of a master-biographer.’ John Carey, Sunday Times‘Richard Holmes’s Dr Johnson & Mr Savage is enthralling, well-written and convincing, a model of tactful psychological biography. One reads it with the pleasure one derives from great imaginative literature.’ Theodore Dalrymple, Spectator‘Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage is now perfectly complemented by Holmes’s volume which acts as a Baedeker through the reeking purlieus of an 18th-century Grub Street, while at the same time bringing fully to life two of the most complex and fascinating characters of English letters.’ Peter Ackroyd‘Holmes, one of the most subtle and imaginative of contemporary biographers, is a virtuoso sleuth, an inspired rooter out of the human being netted in the web of words spun by a poem or a memoir. He combines scholarship with a rare gift of empathy, a deep personal involvement with his subject…His writing seems to glow from the fusion of an acute critical intelligence with a deep poetic and imaginative insight.’ Patrick Taylor Martin, Literary Review‘A chiaroscuro masterpiece.’ David Nokes, TLS