“... Not long after​ the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles ...”

“... cartridges like necklaces’. This was Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, a brutal and precipitate rubber baron, and the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s very different, white-suited Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo. Stahl was a later emanation, imposing his own myths on those of the tribal people, successfully colonising the riverside settlements we were ...”

“... and for each patron a map-maker. The most persistent advocate of the Great Southern Continent, Alexander Dalrymple, was convinced that a land-bridge connected Australia either to New Guinea to the north, or to the paradise de Quiros had named Austrialia del Espiritu Santo to the east. On his first voyage Cook was carrying maps by the French cartographer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”