Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.
In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as 'surely the best biography of Shelley ever written'. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.
He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
William Godwin was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the English Enlightenment.
He fell in love love with and married the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, only to attend her deathbed months later (giving birth to their child, the late Mary Shelley). Heartbroken, Godwin immediately wrote The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, a radically frank and intensely moving biography.