Andrea Wulf

Sunday Times: Review "Magnificent Rebels"

And another fabulous review ... still a few days until publication. 

“Magnificent Rebels is a thrilling intellectual history that reads more like a racy but intelligent novel or even a very superior soap opera where the characters are almost all oddballs, but geniuses … For a few short years, though, the little town of Jena blazed with a youthful, daring and intellectual creativity rarely matched elsewhere and Magnificent Rebels captures this brilliantly” – Sunday Times

click here for a link ... or Download Sunday Times review 

The Times: Best Books of 2022

And The Times chose "Magnificent Rebels" as one of the Best Books of 2022!!

“This witty, gossipy, sparkling history shows how the German city of Jena in the 1790s fizzed with creative energy. It was there that the first Romantics, led by the mighty Goethe, rebelled against the dreary rationalism of the Enlightenment” – The Times, Best Books of 2022

click here for link to The Times ... or for PDF of the full list Download The Times - Best books of 2022

 

The Spectator: Review "Magnificent Rebels"

Yeah ... another great review: “Engrossing new book … Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession. Jena was a prototype of Silicon Valley, a factory in which a handful of geeks open up our skulls and rewire our brains. The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all; we now think with their thoughts and feel with their emotions.” – The Spectator

click here for full review

The Times: Review & Book of the Week - "Magnificent Rebels"

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

 

Booklist: Starred Review "Magnificent Rebels"

And another wonderful early review:

“An extensively researched, gorgeously written, vibrant, multifaceted, and richly elucidative portrait of a group that "changed our world" – starred review in Booklist

 

Spectator Book Club Podcast: Interview about "Magnificent Rebels"

Here is my first Podcast Interview about my new book "Magnificent Rebels" - with Sam Leith at the Spectator Book Club. And this is how he describes it: "Her new book Magnificent Rebels tells the story of the "Jena set" – a staggering assemblage of the superstars of German literature and philosophy who gathered in a small town and collectively came up with a whole new way of looking at the world. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, the von Humboldt brothers – and their brilliant and daring wives and lovers... their intellectual fireworks were matched by a tangle of literary feuds and hair-raising sexual complications. Here's a piece of the jigsaw of intellectual history that most British people will only vaguely know of if at all – and it's fascinating."

Click here to listen to it on Spectator website. Or here for Spotify