From the great biographer of the Romantics, This Long Pursuit is a sweeping exploration of a career devoted to the art of life-writing.

Thirty years ago Richard Holmes published Footsteps - a revolutionary novel that would become a best seller and influence profoundly a whole generation of younger writers.

The Long Pursuit is a companion audiobook in that it ranges widely over the arts, science, poetry and inspiration to reflect upon the practice and importance of biographical writing.

Holmes wraps his arguments in an exquisite cloak of many colours, sewn from stories of myriad different lives. One section of the audiobook is devoted to the biography of women - particularly scientific women who have long suffered the condescension of history, Margaret Cavendish and the lost women of science, Madame de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Somerville amongst them. The audiobook includes a lighthearted look at how the popular reputations of some favourite Romantic figures - including the waterlogged poet Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked lecturer Coleridge and the lunatic bard William Blake - have altered spectacularly over time and the river of biography.

With an author lauded for his magnificent novel The Age of Wonder and for his earlier biographies of Shelley, Coleridge and Johnson, This Long Pursuit contains some of the finest biographical writing ever published.