It’s been a mishmash year for big ideas books but there’s plenty to chew over. Some are best enjoyed at a leisurely pace: stroll through the streets of late 18th-century Jena and watch the German Romantics squabble their way to enlightenment or ponder the meaning of endings with the great Geoff Dyer. Others buzz with contemporary import, like philosophy’s latest whizzkid William MacAskill’s worthy tome.
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