Describe your book in six words
Tennyson before the Beard.
How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2026?
I am thrilled to be on the shortlist for this distinguished History Prize which has always recognised both the academic and the common reader. To realise that a late book of mine, might still appeal to both, and even to younger readers, is the delight of this Ancient Mariner of Biography.
What did the research process look like for you? What were the key milestones along the way?
This biography was not written in my usual Footsteps over-the-ground pursuing style, but in total imaginative immersion in Tennyson’s poetry and letters alone in our Norfolk garden during Covid 2020-21.
Covid closed all the big Tennyson research libraries (Trinity College, Cambridge; Harvard; Lincoln; the British Library), but opened all of Tennyson’s wild coast and sea beaches to me, unrestricted along the then deserted east coast of England, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire.
It also took me back to my forgotten childhood expedition to this coast: in the summer of 1958, bicycling alone with my sister, 150 miles up from Kent to Norfolk (it took three days), wild camping in the empty dunes, days of swimming, reading, talking, laughing. I was then aged 13 and my sister aged 15.
Somewhere here began the slow emergence of the Kraken theme, the monster from various kinds of Deep Sea, which dominates the whole biography.
Mablethorpe beach, Lincolnshire, where Tennyson spent time as a child.
In the National Year of Reading, why does reading historical non-fiction matter today?
Historical biography, which is quite simply the true story of someone’s actual life in the past, seems to me a wonderfully subtle, seductive and magnetic form. It draws in all kinds and ages of readers, takes them vividly – often surprisingly – out into lives and even whole worlds beyond their own, and returns them somehow refreshed and often inspired.
The Wolfson Foundation awards grants to a wide variety of museums, historic buildings and landscapes. Do you have a favourite historical place, or a place that inspired you?
The London Library; or Coleridge’s waterfall at the foot of the Quantock Hills in Somerset.
St Audries Waterfall, at the foot of the Quantock Hills in Somerset.
Read an extract from The Boundless Deep.
Return to the 2026 shortlist.
Top images: ‘The Boundless Deep’ book cover; portrait of Richard Holmes (c) Jeff Morgan.
