The Times – Book of the Year 2022 in the category ‘Ideas’.
“This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. Andrea Wulf (famous for her biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature) takes us to the small university town of Jena at the end of the 18th century. For a few magical years every genius in Germany seems to have washed up here: the polymath Goethe, the playwright Schiller, the poet Novalis and more philosophers than you can shake a stick at: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. The list goes on. They threw parties, squabbled, had affairs… and while they were at it reinvented western thought. As you do.”