Shelley - The Pursuit

Presenting Shelley – The Pursuit (1995) by Richard Holmes, published by Flamingo—a biography that chases a comet in sensible shoes and somehow keeps up. ISBN: 9780006386711. This copy comes via the cheerfully plain-spoken Crappy Old Books, graded Condition: Good—meaning the covers are composed, the pages bright, and the binding more reliable than a Romantic timetable.

What’s inside? Holmes, our most intrepid literary cartographer, goes after Percy Bysshe Shelley—radical, lyric prodigy, professional fire hazard—and follows the trail from Oxford indiscretions (hello, pamphlets on atheism) through elopements, expulsions, manifestos, moonlit oaths, and Mediterranean exiles, to that last storm over the Ligurian coast. He reads the letters, walks the roads, stares at the sea, and comes back with a portrait that feels alive: not a statue on a plinth, but a brilliant, contradictory human being whose ideas sparked like flint against everyone he met.

Expect:

• Revolution with receipts—politics, pacifism, and pamphlets, all footnoted and occasionally on fire.

• The circle that changed everything—Mary Shelley, Byron, Godwin, and assorted geniuses passing notes across Europe.

• Poems as field reports—“Ode to the West Wind,” “Adonais,” and other dispatches from a mind that treated weather like a colleague.

• Travel as propulsion—London to Ireland, Wales to Italy: lodgings that never quite stick, ideals that absolutely do.

• The messy logistics of idealism—money, marriages, reputations, and the practical difficulties of living like a manifesto.

Holmes’s tone is the secret engine: keen-eyed, fair, and wonderfully curious. He neither excuses nor scolds; he pursues—through archives and landscapes—until character, context, and verse click into focus. The result is a biography with the pulse of a novel and the rigor of someone who packed extra pencils.

About this particular volume: Good means honest, well-kept, and ready for re-reading—corners respectable, pages clean, spine cooperative. It looks like it has lived on a shelf where the sun behaves and been opened by hands that know how to turn a page without interrogating it.

Buy it if you’ve ever:

• Suspected that poetry is action at a distance.

• Wanted the human footnotes behind the famous lines.

• Needed a reminder that genius often arrives early, loud, and catastrophically enthusiastic.

• Enjoy biographies that make you feel you’ve walked the miles rather than skimmed the plaques.

Why Richard Holmes? Because he writes biographies like expeditions and returns with maps you can actually use. Why Flamingo (1995)? Because they package big, generous lives in editions you’ll happily carry in a bag. And why Crappy Old Books? Because behind the jocular sign is a tidy hoard of decidedly un-crappy volumes—like this Good copy—eager to prove that the Romantic era still hums under the wallpaper.

In short: Shelley – The Pursuit is a vivid, affectionate, unsentimental chase after a poet who refused to slow down. Delivered in Good condition from Crappy Old Books, where the only thing truly tempest-tossed will be your plan to read “just one chapter.”

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