And another Best Books pick … this one in the Telegraph “Best Biographies of 2022”: “Andrea Wulf’s “Magnificent Rebels” resurrects the “Jena Set” – Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Novalis – who breathed romance back into nature after the Enlightenment had reduced it to “a monotonous machine”. They invented our modern obsession with “self”, yet in Britain are barely known compared with their avowed disciples, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth et al. In Wulf’s page-turner, the Germans are as badly behaved as the later Bloomsberries, and surprisingly likeable: “My novel is like a stocking someone knits away at so slowly it gets grubby,” complains Goethe.
And again in Best Books of 2022