Ecce Homo

In the autumn of 1888, shortly before his mental collapse in Turin, Nietzsche wrote this short autobiography with chapters called 'Why I Am So Wise', 'Why I Am So Clever' and 'Why I Write Such Good Books'. He looks back on his illnesses, his diet, his love of music and each of his books in turn, and ends by declaring that he is a destiny.

The title is Pilate's phrase 'Behold the man'. The tone swings between brilliance, humour and unsettling grandiosity, and the book was only published in 1908. It is the best map of his work by its own author, so it is worth reading after one or two of his other books.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.