The German Greeks was announced for end of June, because I didn’t want to rush it. But it was so inspiring to write that I finished earlier.

So I’m releasing the ebook early, on the quiet, at the special price of 2.99. When the paperback comes out at the end of June, the ebook will go up to the regular 9.99.

The work has already received a couple of editorial reviews, including from Prof Robert Wicks, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, who called it: ‘A fine, enjoyably readable and historically accurate book that informatively and excitingly portrays the lives of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.’

The lightning book cover (which I designed myself) is inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who preaches:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

For Schopenhauer, our character is inborn and immutable, and apparent, at every stage of life, in the face and, especially, the eyes, which are the ‘mirror of the mind’. For this reason, when someone surprises or disappoints us, we never say, ‘Oh, his character has changed’ but, ‘Oh, I must have been wrong about him.’

Under the changeable shell of his years, his relationships, even his store of knowledge and opinions, there hides, like a crab under its shell, the identical and real man, quite unchangeable and always the same.

Schopenhauer took this idea very seriously, and when sitting for painters, obsessed over the depiction of his eyes.

That’s why, now, his eyes are still so full of lightning.

You can order the ebook here in the US and here in the UK.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be very receptive to any comments and feedback.

PS. I appreciate that many will prefer to await the paperback or hardback.