Richard Holmes's Reading List

"Andrea Wulf's superb popular science biography "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World," which ranges across Europe and South America and the beginnings of environmentalism in the 19th century."

"the compelling memoirs by the veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson, "We Chose to Speak of War and Strife," which includes a history of this heroic, truth-telling eyewitness form."

""Mapping the Heavens," a strikingly lucid account of the expansion, not just of the universe, but the way we have tried to understand it, from the Babylonians to black holes and dark matter."

"For a month last summer I sat on a garden bench under a cherry tree in France, and very slowly read Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." All I can say is that it was an utterly transporting experience."

""On the Road," by Jack Kerouac. Very few readers nowadays can have heard of it as I did, in 1960, the book that made me fall in love with America aged 15."

"The first writer to show me how this could be done was Michael Holroyd, with his "Lytton Strachey" (1968) set in England mostly before and after the First World War, and recreating the whole lost world and sensibility of Bloomsbury."

"the weird street encounter of Alexander Masters's "Stuart: A Life Backwards.""

"the haunted journey into the labyrinthine inner world of an English opium eater recounted by Frances Wilson in "Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey.""

"Oliver Sacks's brilliant, scatty scientific memoirs, "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood," can work the same clean-sweep magic."

"Joe Simpson's grim, breathless mountaineering classic, "Touching the Void.""

"the English singer Ian Bostridge's deeply alienated "Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession," a highly personal account of the German song cycle "Winterreise.""

"Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall's truly haunting seafaring mystery "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst." All these books have the necessary transportation powers."

"A graphic novel by Sydney Padua, "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage." This is an absolutely inspired creation: a cartoon story — "(Mostly) True" — about two real-life Victorian scientists who invented and described the first-ever computer. It's hilariously funny and alarmingly clever."

"I have no memory of actually reading my first and favorite book, but its images haunt me to this day, nearly 70 years later. It was Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses.""