Part biography, part critical analysis and commentary on the work and part an attempt to humanise Nietzsche, this well-written and well-researched book explores in particular the last productive year of Nietzsche’s life, which he spent in Turin. During that year he wrote some of his most important works; The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. Tragically he suffered a complete nervous breakdown the following year and stopped being able to write. I’m not best qualified to talk about Nietzsche's thinking but I found that the book brought Nietzsche the man to life, and made him a sympathetic character to whom I could relate. Not an easy read when considering Nietzsche’s philosophy but accessible and readable when talking about his daily activities, his friendships, his anxieties and his conflicts.

I read a new edition of this book for review, and I enjoyed the read. It was detailed and intimate as the title says and I learnt a lot about Nietzsche as a person. This is all the more remarkable given that it only covers the last few years of his life while he was living in Turin. It covers his relationship with the city, his habits and his relationships with people. It does so in a compassionate way - what the author frames as 'befriending', which I really enjoyed. They are obviously very knowledgeable, and I'm not sure what some of the other reviews here on Goodreads are talking about when they say it's under-researched - the detail is granular!

This Turin time stands out in Nietzsche's biography because of the story of the Turin Horse (which inspired a movie that's a bit of a household name - in our house anyway) and is constantly brought up in service of all kinds of points in literature - a kind of parable. I wondered if this is why this is being republished now. This is critiqued in this book (is it all it's cracked up to be?) and that's interesting for scholarship but also, that final chapter is brief, and I wish there'd been some more payoff, a conclusion or something to say something meaningful about what it all adds up to.