“[Holmes] does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing. . . . Heaven for his fans [and] the best account imaginable for the richness of his form.” —The Observer
“I am a Richard Holmes addict. . . . Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell these stories with such verve and resonance.” —Oliver Sacks
“Elegant. . . . Nobody has thought longer or harder about the nature of biography as a literary form than Holmes.” —Wall Street Journal
“Holmes’s style pleasingly resembles that of his fellow Englishman, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. Like that celebrated man of letters, Holmes comes across as contagiously curious, casually erudite, and just a bit daft. . . . In spending so much of his life chronicling the lives of poets, he has, to the delight of his readers, become one.” —The Christian Science Monitor
