Since Goethe lived to be eighty-two, his life provides an almost unmanageable amount of material for the biographer. Matthew Bell cuts a path through this forest by offering an intellectual biography. The events of Goethe’s life are recounted concisely as a framework within which to explore his contacts with philosophy (principally that of Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant and Schelling), his study of the natural world and his reflections on politics and power. The many strengths of Bell’s book also include incisive studies of Goethe’s literary works, from the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which took Europe by storm, to Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy (1832), which mystified contemporaries but which we have gradually learned to read and appreciate.

Goethe’s philosophical coordinates came initially from Rousseau and Spinoza, two thinkers who appealed to and fortified his own disposition. Rousseau’s concept of amour de soi, the urge for self--preservation, appears in Goethe as the need for individual authenticity. The opposing force, Rousseau’s amour propre, becomes the dead weight of social conventions suppressing whatever is distinctive, original and creative. Hence Goethe’s protagonists are powerful, charismatic personalities who experience society as a ‘prison’, the metaphor used by Werther and Faust. For some, such as Werther, the only way out is death. Others, such as Faust, preserve their essential character, but the struggle to do so leaves victims in its wake. Werther himself, unable to conquer his love for the married Lotte, leaves her and her husband devastated by his suicide. Faust’s egotism inflicts tragedy on his lover Gretchen. Goethe is honest about the cost to others of preserving one’s own authenticity.

Disliking the arid Lutheranism of his upbringing, Goethe found a more congenial religious outlook in the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who was often unjustly reviled as an atheist. Spinoza offered him a God who was identical with the world. There was no need to fantasise a Heaven: you had immediate access