- Footsteps by Richard Holmes
I first read this many years ago and it has stayed with me. Every so often, I return to it in order to immerse myself in its wonderful prose and insights. It combines travelogue with biography, detective work with a probing inner exploration, and is both an account of a physical journey and a remapping of the writer's imagination. The book opens with an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey, in which Holmes describes his own trek over the Cevennes, during which he abandoned his ambition to become a poet, having been led "far away into the undiscovered land of other's men and women's lives ... towards biography". It is the turning point of his life and for the remainder of the book - as he hunts down subjects that include Mary Wollenstencraft, Shelley, Gerard de Nerval and Gautier - he goes on to explore the nature of the relationship between biographer and quarry. The book so enraptured me that I myself walked in the company of friends over the Cevennes in his footsteps. It was one of the best journeys of my own life.