The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 – Essential Reading: "A buoyant work of intellectual history"
New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2022: "Exuberant narrative"
The Times, Book of the Year: "This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. This witty, sparkling history ... fizzed with creative energy"
The Sunday Times, Best Books of 2022: "A rollicking romp ... enormous fun"
Financial Times, Best Books of 2022: "Wulf’s wonderful book brings to life the 'Jena Set' and a golden age of German culture"
Telegraph, Best Biographies of 2022: "In Wulf’s page-turner, the Germans are as badly behaved as the later Bloomsberries, and surprisingly likeable"
The Economist, Best Books of 2022: “Arresting … it reads as if Iris Murdoch had set a novel during an especially muddy phase of German metaphysics”
Washington Post, Best Books of 2022 – 50 Notable Works of Non–Fiction
New Zealand Listener, Best Books of 2022: “Wulf’s exuberant, vividly written book”
Prospect Magazine, Best Books of 2022: "Where do ideas come from? If Magnificent Rebels is anything to go by, the answer is groups of degenerates who spend most of their time carousing, gossiping, and dreaming up poetry"
Times Literary Supplement, Best Books of 2022 - picked twice: Sam Leith: “I was knocked out by Andrea Wulf’s "Magnificent Rebels” and Frances Wilson: "The brilliance of Wulf’s approach lies in her depiction of cock-of-the- walk egotism"
New Statesman, Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: "Andrea Wulf’s adroit and richly detailed study of the 'Jena set' shows how the thinkers who coalesced in a small university town in Germany at the end of the 18th century changed the world"
New Statesman, Best Books of 2022 - picked three times by their reviewers: Henry Marsh: “A pure joy to read” and Sue Prideaux: “A clever, enlightening and thoroughly entertaining book” and Jeremy Cliffe: "An utterly absorbing account ranging from high philosophical theory to mischievously profane stories of ideas, love and ambition in Napoleonic Europe"
The Times, 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”
BBC History Magazine, Best Books of 2022
Chicago Tribune, Best Books of 2022: "Spirited"
The Spectator, Best Books of the Year 2022 (Peter Frankopan): "I also greatly admired Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, about the intellectual powerhouse of Jena that exploded like a firework in the late 1790s. History writing at its best"
Tom Holland: "A thrilling page-turner, by turns comical & tragic. My book of the year"
John Banville: "Magnificent Rebels is - well - magnificent. This is how such books should be written, with clarity, passion and delight. A thrilling intellectual adventure"
Comments