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“... an accidental voyage to the Moon in a hot air balloon. It was a knockabout yarn in the vein of Baron Munchhausen’s adventures but presented as reportage, much of it devoted to scientifically detailed descriptions of the Earth’s surface as viewed from the upper atmosphere, the curvature of the globe illuminated by sunrise, and the gradual diminution of ...”

“... Commanding’, which describes the all-round intellectualism of his youth; it was he who taught Alexander Graham Bell the principles of electricity. However, when we read that Murray ‘cherished the fact’ of befriending a local ancient, alive when William and Mary were proclaimed joint sovereign by Parliament in 1689, we find the ancient too ancient for ...”

“... After profiting as one of Rachman’s rent-collectors in the 1950s, he became a West London drugs baron and then, under his new name, head of the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Through this Black Power organisation he became a friend of Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, a host to Muhammad Ali and a recipient of ...”

“... In 1818, Pushkin quarrelled and fought an abortive duel with him. Küchelbecker’s second, Baron Delvig, was also an old lycée boy. There is a reference to him in Eugene Onegin: Lensky, reciting his verse, is said to sound ‘like Delvig when he’s dining drunk’. With Stendhalian swagger, Pushkin faced Küchelbecker, and shouted at ...”

“... the concepts of genius and originality, and the experiences offered by art. In Aesthetica (1750), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten argued that beauty lay not in the object itself but in what the observer brought to it. In 1764, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s monumental history of ancient art saw the Ancient Greek images of the human body as coming closest to ...”

“... a year as he got older) while trying to prove (on extremely slight grounds) his right to the title Baron Chandos of Sudeley. The rest of his time he spent in a struggle against copyright in the name of genius. In Brydges’s view, copyright rewarded those who pandered to the masses, leaving real talent to founder. Authorship, in this regime, was ...”

“... been. It is an exercise resembling the progressive dismantling of a set of Russian dolls. Prince Alexander Labanoff, in his 19th-century edition of Mary’s letters and papers, a work of scholarship which can stand the test of time, identified the mole as the secretary of the Embassy, Chérelles, an identification followed and apparently confirmed by Conyers ...”

“... Yuppies: Hackney’ against the scrupulous accuracy, the wonderfully precise physical movement, in Alexander Baron’s novel from 1963, The Lowlife. Baron, with a sense of possession earned by experience, re-creates the boarding-houses, bus routes, dog tracks, and streets down which it is still possible to navigate. He ...”

“... Cavalier’, more famous than any other picture by him. The contest between Lord Hertford and Baron James de Rothschild to buy it at the Pourtalès sale in 1865 made it even more so. But it is sobering to realise that the Dead Orlando, a picture of the youthful warrior in black silk, lying dead surrounded by skulls, was quite as famous as these works. The ...”

“... for stealing the ship’s paint supplies. On his release he set himself up as a West London drugs baron. Street-sharp, an eloquent dandy who swooshed around town in a red Ford Thunderbird, he soon became well-known among the many writers and painters who hung out in Shepherd’s Bush and on the Portobello Road, for whom he embodied the cool, transgressive ...”

“... in the last hundred years: T.E. Lawrence was able to shoot ducks from his balcony at Aleppo’s Baron Hotel. Waterfield’s on-the-ground approach also gives some substance to his logistical calculations. He estimates that between Sardis and Cunaxa the army averaged 30 km a day – not bad for at least 50,000 men, women, children, slaves and tradesmen, 3000 ...”

“... in a city that was, at least in theory, barred to all but a handful of very wealthy Jews. He was a baron with the ear of the chancellor; his business interests – not just state loans, but steamships, coal mines and the country’s first railway – transformed the Austrian economy. But when he bought a country estate it had to be in Prussia, not ...”

“... that great treasury of German science and literature, Lessing and Schiller, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt.’ German culture seemed doubly the culture of freedom: it was not only the language of human idealism, but the gateway out of the ghetto. Indeed language became a weapon – in the hands of the Government, to impose political ...”

“... Louis IX under the Treaty of Paris, peace with Llywelyn in Wales, with another brother-in-law, Alexander II in Scotland. The only man with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came ...”

“... operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was ...”