The first proper review is in. And it's a amazing. Here is the short quote from it: “Andrea Wulf’s delightful and invigorating book Magnificent Rebels — a worthy successor to her acclaimed study of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature ... Magnificent Rebels is a triumph of unseen toil, hardly suspected by the reader, in the midst of the sociable whirl of the main narrative ... This delightful history captures the "vibe" of 1790s Jena where parties, feuds and gossip fuelled a great intellectual flowering” – Book of the Week, The Times
But I particularly like this bit ... the nerdy scholar in me is very happy:
"The secret of Wulf’s achievement is in the “notes” at the end of Magnificent Rebels, a great wedge of a section so thick it brings the reader to an unexpected halt two thirds of the way through the book’s bulk. Magnificent Rebels is a triumph of unseen toil, hardly suspected by the reader, in the midst of the sociable whirl of the main narrative. But all the time you realise Wulf has been sweating away out of sight, in the dim caverns of archives and the flickering, unvisited galleries of notes and appendices. Triumphantly, the book is not touched with one speck of archival dust, nor does it sag with any sign of exhaustion in the academic salt mines. The reader is simply presented with bright jewels of anecdote: Goethe lowering a piece of cake on a string from his study window to children playing below; Hegel dodging Napoleon’s invading soldiers to get the manuscript of The Phenomenology of the Spirit out of town. But above all the glitter of the parties, feuds and gossip that are so frequently inseparable from intellectual life".
Download The Times - 17.08.22