Many people helped me in different ways through this book’s four-year journey. I am grateful to those I have met, and those I have not. To the Nietzsche scholars, dead and alive, who have clarified and translated the texts, in some cases clearing away later creative editorship to get back to Nietzsche’s original, untangling the true from the false in the Nachlass, the literary estate.
Thank you to my editors in the UK and the US, Mitzi Angel and Tim Duggan, for setting off new trains of thought. To Nigel Warburton who has shown immense generosity and swung his hammer to great effect while overseeing the philosophy.
In Switzerland and Germany: Erdmann von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff of the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, Tanja Fehling of Klassik-stiftung.de, Professor Peter André Block and Dr Peter Villwock of the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils-Maria, and Katya Fleischer of the Richard Wagner Museum in Tribschen.
In the UK, thank you Felicity Bryan, Michele Topham and all the team at Felicity Bryan Associates. At Faber, special mentions go to Laura Hassan, Emmie Francis, Donna Payne, Anne Owen, Anna Davidson, John Grindrod and Sophie Portas. Thank you Eleanor Rees for the copy edit and Rachel Thorne for clearing permissions. Thank you Louise Duffett (relative of Harry Kessler) and the Classics Department of Godolphin School in London. Thank you Roger Lomax for casting your eye over the complications of nineteenth-century currencies, and Laura Sanderson for a hilarious session on aphorisms. I am grateful to the team at Andrew Nurnberg and, as always, to the omniscient staff of the London Library.
In the USA, in addition to Tim Duggan, thanks to George Lucas, William Wolfslau, and to Hilary McClellen for fact-checking.
Special thanks to Gillian Malpass, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson and the late Tom Rosenthal, all of whom gave me courage and support at the very start, to Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper, Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Sarah Bakewell for useful conversations, and to my family for tact, criticism, research, and tolerating the ghost about the house.