"Magnificent Rebels" is on New Statesman list for Best Books of the Year 2022. Picked thrice:
Henry Marsh: Andrea Wulf's "Magnificent Rebels" is about the German Romantic writers such as Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, Goethe, Caroline Böhmer and many others in Jena at the turn of the 19th century, was a pure joy to read. A seemingly more innocent and optimistic age than ours, despite the Napoleonic wars, autocratic governments and terrible child mortality.
Sue Prideaux: "We’re familiar with the sexual and intellectual musical chairs of the Lake Poets and the Bloomsbury lot; in Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (John Murray) by Andrea Wulf we encounter their German forerunner. Wulf’s rebels are the “Jena set” of the 1790s. Caroline Böhmer is the female disrupter, Goethe is the giant dominating the lesser intellects, and the philosopher Schelling presaged environmentalism. All were inspired by the French Revolution and idealised Napoleon. This is a clever, enlightening and thoroughly entertaining book"
Jeremy Cliffe: "Around the turn of the 19th century a cluster of thinkers, writers and scientists formed in the small German university town of Jena and laid the foundations of the modern world. It is a bold thesis. But Andrea Wulf asserts it convincingly in Magnificent Rebels (John Murray), an utterly absorbing account ranging from high philosophical theory to mischievously profane stories of ideas, love and ambition in Napoleonic Europe. Through an interwoven series of portraits Wulf shows how Enlightenment rationalism evolved into Romanticism, and thus produced the Western sense of self that defines much about our lives to this day"