The bard pays homage to his two muses: his wife and his football club
Faust and furious
GORDON PARSONS recommends the biography of the German polymath whose life provides an interesting take on a revolutionary age
HERALDING THE UNKNOWN: Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull features the Commission of Five submitting the text of the Declaration of Independence. From left to right, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who actually were never in the same room at the same time
[US Capitol/Public domain]
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by an incoherent show that fails to question stereotypical assumptions about the Soviet Union
JOHN McINALLY welcomes a rigorous class analysis of the history and exploitation of sectarianism by the Scottish ruling elite
WILL STONE, JAMES WALSH and MARIA DUARTE review Souleymane’s Story, Sunlight, Good Fortune, and After The Hunt
ALEX HALL recommends an exhaustive investigation of the means by which the Starmer faction assassinated the left
DAVID MORGAN recommends a refreshingly inspiring novel that features encounters with some tremendous women
Goethe: His Faustian Life
AN Wilson, Bloomsbury, £25
AFTER their detailed and in-depth research, biographers may well end up either loving or loathing their subject. There can be no doubt that AN Wilson has great affection for a man he believes a genius and one of the most remarkable figures in modern history, although the character the reader will meet is not one who emerges as altogether admirable.
Like most biographers, Wilson discovers the figure he is looking for. His study presents an “exquisite lyricist, passionate scientist, soulful lover, conservative statesman, [who was] also a wild man, obscene and out of control, foul mouthed, coarse and alcohol fuelled.”
It would not be unfair to suggest that “the prodigious size of the literary output” of this poet and novelist, playwright, scientist, philosopher and even psychologist, who has the kind of standing in Germany that Pushkin has in Russia or Shakespeare in England, is virtually unknown to British readers.
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WILL PODMORE recommends an excellent and useful introduction to a lesser-known giant of the scientific revolution in Britain
GORDON PARSONS negotiates an exhaustive biography of WH Auden that explores his growing detachment from England
FIONA O’CONNOR recommends a biography of a Portuguese modernist poet who maintained a philosophical approach to his own being and is best encountered within the playfulness of his writing