Richard Holmes (biographer)

Richard Holmes ( born November 5, 1945 in London) is an award winning British biographer of romantics and historians of science of the 19th century. He is married to the novelist Rose Tremain.

Life

Holmes attended Downside School and studied at Churchill College, Cambridge. He was a member of the Royal Society of Literature and of the British Academy and specialized in biographies of the 19th century / romance. He received the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award for " Shelley: The Pursuit ," James Tait Black Memorial 1993 Prize for " Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage " and Duff Cooper Prize in 1998 for " Coleridge: Darker Reflections". Known to a wider audience, he was especially with The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science ( 2008), which won the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award.