'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.'

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?

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

I thought it was Denis, after a heavy night.

Done. Thanks for the prompt.

That was my dad’s favourite beer. Enjoy!

Definitely Volvos do this.

‘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.