How Goethe sold his soul to Faust

New Statesman

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How Goethe sold his soul to Faust

Some biographers, perhaps more than we know of, come to resent, despise and, in extreme cases, loathe their subjects during the long process of writing about them. Not so AN Wilson. He approaches Goethe with an almost Goethean fervour. His book is a double biography, since it is as much concerned with the conception, development and difficult birth of the drama Faust as it is with the life and doings of the play’s magisterial and tirelessly self…