"And then I saw it, quite clearly against the western sky, the old bridge of Langogne. It was about fifty yards downstream, and it was broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy." This is the first, crucial epiphany in Richard Holmes's autobiographical confessions, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), the origin tales of his biographical career. It has been, to this, its apparent heart, a brilliant and controversial career, quite as concerned with biography as its subject as it has been with its subjects' biographies. Holmes was eighteen, following, or trying to follow, the path of Robert Louis Stevenson as described in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), when he saw the ruin of the old bridge across the Allier from where he stood on the modern, operative bridge to Langogne. And it hit him: "So Stevenson had crossed there, not on this modern bridge. There was...