Sebastian Shakespeare

Teutonic Titans

Measuring the World

By

Quercus 248pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

This novel comes freighted with high expectations. It has sold a million copies in its native Germany and has been hailed as the most successful German novel since Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. At first glance it is hard to see why. Measuring the World tells the story of two nineteenth-century scientists: Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer, and Professor Gauss, the German mathematician and astronomer. We follow their parallel lives as they set out to measure the world. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us