Audiobooks by Richard Holmes

Falling Upwards: Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture The Aeronauts

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A DAILY TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW REPUBLIC BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A TIME MAGAZINE TOP 10 NONFICTION BOOK OF 2013 From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to analyse the air to war generals floating across enemy lines, Richard Holmes takes to the air in this heart-lifting history of pioneer balloonists. Falling Upwards asks why they risked their lives, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet. The stories range from early ballooning rivals to the long-distance voyages of American entrepreneurs; from the legendary balloon escape from the Prussian siege of Paris to dauntless James Glaisher, who in the 1860s flew seven miles above the earth - without oxygen. Falling Upwards has inspired the Major Motion Picture The Aeronauts - in cinemas SOON.

Richard Holmes (Author), Peter Noble (Narrator)

Audiobook

This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

'A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation' Oldie In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this pursuit is a powerful evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zélide. He investigates the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Coleridge, and the mad-visionary bard William Blake. The diversity of Holmes's material is testimony to his empathy, erudition and at times his mischievous streak. This is his most personal and seductive writing yet.

Richard Holmes (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

Audiobook

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

Falling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its subject. Dramatic sequences move from the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the revelatory ascents over the great Victorian cities and sprawling industrial towns of Northern Europe, the astonishing long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise, and the French photographer Félix Nadar to the terrifying high-altitude flights of James Glaisher, FRS, who rose above seven miles without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology as well as the environmental notion—so important to us today—of a “fragile” planet. Balloons were also used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the American Civil War, including a memorable flight by General Custer. Readers will discover the many writers and dreamers—from Mary Shelley to Edgar Allan Poe, from Charles Dickens to Jules Verne—who felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work. Moreover, through the strange allure of the great balloonists, Holmes offers another of his subtle portraits of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision. “In the same month that Julian Barnes published Levels of Life, with its melancholy meditations on balloon flight, Richard Holmes presents a full-blown, lyrical history of the same subject, investigating the strangeness, detachment and powerful romance of ‘falling upwards’ into a seemingly alien and uninhabitable element. Holmes lovingly charts a course from the Montgolfier brothers’ first hydrogen-fuelled flights in the 1780s to the use of balloons by fugitive East Germans in the 1970s and the latest forays by polar explorer David Hempleman-Adams, a history full of awe and inefficiency…Holmes is a truly masterly storyteller .”—Evening Standard (London)

Richard Holmes (Author), Gildart Jackson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Western Front

Military historian Richard Holmes turns his attention to the infamous First World War trench line, the Western Front. Of the nine million British and Dominion soldiers who were killed in action in the Great War, most died here. In this thorough examination of the role the Front played in the war, the eminent historian Richard Holmes considers its initial creation, the rapid expansion of the British army (which led to problems with the supply of men and munitions), the challenge of coping with life and death at the Front, and the regular attempts by soldiers to 'break the trench'. He also examines two major battles in detail, thos of the Somme and Verdun. Richly detailed and highly authoritative, Holmes' work clarifies the complexities of the Western Front and examines its context within the most bitter and bloody of wars.

Richard Holmes (Author), Richard Holmes (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science.When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery-astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical-swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science-an era whose consequences are with us still. "Richard Holmes-who is almost unfairly gifted both as a writer of living, luminous prose and as a tireless researcher-braids Herschel's story together with a dozen others to create the most joyful, exciting book of the year."-Time, The Top 10 Everything of 2009

Richard Holmes (Author), Gildart Jackson (Narrator)

Audiobook