RICHARD HOLMES is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and was one of The New York Times Book Review's Best Books of the Year in 2009. His other books include Falling Upwards, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (an NBCC finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Blake Prize). Holmes is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in Great Britain.