Falling Upwards

Richard Holmes is the author of the prize-winning and best-selling The Age of Wonder, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009 and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science writing. He is the author of many other prize-winning books including Shelley, Coleridge, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, and the classic work, Footsteps. He lives in Norwich and is married to the novelist Rose Tremain.

'[Holmes] has a rare and infectious capacity for wonderment ... dazzling ... I felt I was flying - with the sensations of hilarity, ecstasy and terror that are rightly provoked by our escape from gravity ... while I was reading Holmes's heady, swoopingly aerodynamic book' Observer '[A] captivating and surely definitive history of the madness of pre-Wright brothers ballooning' Times, Book of the Week 'The delight the author clearly took in researching and writing it carries over to the reader above all what Holmes teases out ... is the very interesting idea that ballooning gave us, quite literally, a different point of view ... a wholly novel experience of sublimity. This exhilarating book, wonderfully written, generously illustrated and beautifully published, captures all that and more' Spectator 'It is a tragic tale, punctuated with ghastly accidents, but thanks to Holmes's enthusiasm and eager curiosity it remains valiantly airborne' Sunday Times 'Holmes is truly a masterly storyteller and can make the most digressive material cohere' Evening Standard '[A] wonderful history of the early years of ballooning' Daily Telegraph 'Enthralling, picaresque history ... Holmes cuts his thrilling set-pieces with haunting images ... Appropriately his prose is lighter than air elegantly traversing aviators and eras. It means that as his balloonists embark on journeys full of danger and wonder the reader is suspended in the basket alongside them' Financial Times 'Endlessly exhilarating ... packed full of swashbuckling stories, as well as fascinating historical accounts of the use of balloons. It is also a singularly beautiful book, wonderfully designed and illustrated and quite clearly a product of love' Mail on Sunday '[H]is enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures ... it is hard not to discern something similarly joyous in this account ... a spirited work' Economist