Crossing Paths with Giants of History by Patrick Richardson

About Crossing Paths with the Giants of History

Intrigued by the 320 Gedenktafeln which litter the historic Old Town of Göttingen, author and explorer Patrick Richardson discovers during his visits to his father-in-law in this fascinating small German town that seventeen of these commemorative plaques are to world-famous people with whom he has links, however indirect. These include Coleridge, Schopenhauer and Oppenheimer, amongst other literary, political, and scientific giants.

In this highly unusual book, which combines memoir, travelogue and biography, he narrates how these plaques trigger long-forgotten memories about how his path crossed theirs often during his journeys in South America, Central Africa, Central Asia, and the South Pacific. At the same time, he sheds light on their little-known, often enthralling, time in Göttingen, where all but two of them were educated at its extraordinary Georg-August-Universität (associated with over forty Nobel laureates).

About Patrick Richardson

Patrick Richardson was born in Sussex and raised in Edinburgh, where he went to university. He lived in Amsterdam for eleven years before he returned to Scotland. He has been exploring remote corners of the world for several decades, and writing travel articles about these for the past thirty. He has written for The Guardian, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times. In 2008 he published Reports from Beyond, a collection of his travel writing. In 2014 this was followed by his memoir In Search of Landfall  which, loosely structured on Homer's Odyssey, is an almost mythical meditation on childhood, the loss of innocence, love and the passing of time. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and read (twice) at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and many others, as well as the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the National Gallery of Scotland.