Matthew Bell

This is big. This is Bostridge.

Books of the year 2025 New Statesman writers and guests – including Jonathan Franzen, Jacqueline Rose, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek – choose their favourite reading this year

My 'Goethe: A Life in Ideas' is recommended as one of the New Statesman's books of 2025 by the great tenor and interpreter of German song, Ian Bostridge www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

A lone inquirer For most biographers, a paucity of source material poses formidable challenges. For the biographer endeavouring to array Goethe’s life along a coherent narrative line, it is surfeit that is daunting....

"Biographies necessarily look back in time, but the best of them invite us to see the present anew. This is surely one of the chief virtues of Matthew Bell's insightful study," says @thetls.bsky.social of Goethe: A Life in Ideas. We couldn't agree more! Read the full review here:

'Goethe’s intellectual world, it becomes clear, is both familiar to us and radically different from our own. Biographies necessarily look back in time, but the best of them invite us to see the present anew. This is surely one of the chief virtues of Matthew Bell’s insightful study.'

A lone inquirer For most biographers, a paucity of source material poses formidable challenges. For the biographer endeavouring to array Goethe’s life along a coherent narrative line, it is surfeit that is daunting. ...

Review of my 'Goethe: A Life in Ideas' by David Wellbery in the TLS: ‘[carves a path through Goethe’s life] skilfully and insightfully … rooted in meticulous historical scholarship … insightful study’ www.the-tls.com/lives/biogra...

Goethe, a man of ideas | Daniel Johnson | The Critic Magazine Goethe seemed to have lived many lives, for no man in history has shown glimpses of genius across such a wide range of human endeavour.

Think you know everything about Goethe? He was a poet, a scientist, a rebel… and a total genius. Daniel Johnson breaks it all down in The Critic. Read the review of @matthewgbell.bsky.social's book here:

Goethe, a man of ideas | Daniel Johnson | The Critic Magazine Goethe seemed to have lived many lives, for no man in history has shown glimpses of genius across such a wide range of human endeavour.

Excellent review of my ‘Goethe: A Life in Ideas’ by Daniel Johnson in The Critic thecritic.co.uk/issues/novem... “Bell’s brilliant biography does full justice to this greatest of German Dichter und Denker”

This is barely scratching the surface. It’s not just that you need at least 20 tabs open — they all need to stay arranged in the same left-to-right sequence, with the tabs that must always be open on the left, and the less necessary tabs on the right. How else can you possibly do it?

Research sheds new light on contradictions between Goethe's writing and political beliefs | King's College London Professor Matthew Bell, Professor of German and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, reveals how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s political ideas pervade his li...

www.kcl.ac.uk/news/researc...

Ritchie Robertson - Darkness & Light Ritchie Robertson: Darkness & Light - Goethe: A Life in Ideas by Matthew Bell

Goethe: A Life in Ideas by @matthewgbell.bsky.social gets a sharp, illuminating review from Ritchie Robertson in @litreview.bsky.social! “Deeply learned, crisply written.” Read it here: literaryreview.co.uk/darkness-light-2

‘many strengths’, ‘great lucidity’, ‘clear eyed’, ‘deeply learned, crisply written biography’, ‘it will henceforth be among the indispensable studies of Goethe’.

Ritchie Robertson - Darkness & Light Ritchie Robertson: Darkness & Light - Goethe: A Life in Ideas by Matthew Bell

literaryreview.co.uk/darkness-lig...
My 'Goethe: A Life in Ideas' reviewed by Ritchie Robertson in the Literary Review

I thought it was Denis, after a heavy night.

Goethe: A Life in Ideas by Matthew Bell. A new intellectual biography of Goethe, examining the paradox of his thought.

In this important and ambitious work, @matthewgbell.bsky.social offers a wide-ranging intellectual biography of Goethe, tracing the evolution of his thought and reassessing its value.

Out now! Explore a free sample: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Published today by the good folk at Princeton.

Cover image of Matthew Bell's book 'Goethe: A Life in Ideas', showing a marble bust of Goethe

Only 8 days to wait until the publication of this baby

Done. Thanks for the prompt.

That was my dad’s favourite beer. Enjoy!

Definitely Volvos do this.

“Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.”

‘Do not make the patient suspect that he has melancholy. Rather just treat him for indigestion; help him against his excessive belief, terror and joy; and keep him from [too much] thinking’ (al-Razi, 'Comprehensive Book', c. 900 CE, quoting Rufus of Ephesus, 'On Melancholia', c. 100 CE)

I’m increasingly thinking that AI is going to be a blessing for universities. The output of LLMs shows us, clear as day, how much better our students can do things if we teach and assess them well.

In a way this is a relief. The Meta AI engine has been trained on my book, but thankfully hasn’t been able to say anything useful about it.

Utter drivel and pap. And some of it just made up. The book only mentions Benjamin once in passing. It also says very little about Freud.

Uh oh. Here we go.

If revenge is best served cold, this was piping hot.

At a stroke Reform have removed the whip from 20% of their MPs.