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“... unveil heaven’s darker nature. His highest reading was 39 on the scale. The Prussian scientist Alexander vonHumboldt, who carried the instrument with him on his travels, took a reading of 46 during his ascent of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes in 1802. The diagram of Mount Chimborazo from ...”

“... He was​ the greatest man since the Deluge.’ This assessment of Alexander vonHumboldt by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography, may be a slight exaggeration, but it reflects Humboldt’s extraordinary reputation among his contemporaries ...”

“... Alexander vonHumboldt was once called the last man who knew everything, the last generalist before an age of specialisation definitively set in. His work ranged across geography, geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, climatology, chemistry, astronomy, demography, ethnography and political economy ...”

“... America fitted under the bulge of West Africa, something that the explorer and natural philosopher Alexander vonHumboldt had remarked on a century earlier. Humboldt believed the match showed that the Atlantic Ocean was a flooded valley; Wegener tried fitting the continents ...”

“... is even more concise, discussing as it does Huysmans, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Xavier de Maistre, Alexander vonHumboldt, Ruskin, Burke, Wordsworth, van Gogh, Edward Hopper and the Book of Job. Of course, when de Botton dissects the writings of, say, Schopenhauer, he’s only interested in the ‘consoling and ...”

“... published in 1891, the year of Morelli’s death, is more collegial). Morelli’s nemesis, Wilhelm von Bode, the director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, claimed it displayed a ‘most dangerous dilettantism’. Certainly Morelli was among the first modern connoisseurs – in his attention to the surface of the canvas, his anti-academic posture, and the ...”

“... as important for scientific ontology as they were for data management. The great German naturalist Alexander vonHumboldt brilliantly synthesised the local with the global in artfully coloured and coded maps that showed the distribution of characteristic forms of vegetation (e.g. pines v. palms), thus creating what ...”

“... it and, as it were, getting nowhere before at last getting to the madhouse. The life of Heinrich von Kleist, discussed by Nigel Reeves in Romanticism and the Sciences, was exactly fashioned around this collapse. Reason was revealed to be a fraud, the world a perverted madhouse, peopled with spectral doubles, doubles emanating from a multiple and ...”

“... as the wife of a musician even greater than her father, while the second, the Princesse Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, more or less ran his life after 1848 when he completely abandoned giving concerts and set up as Kapellmeister to the court of Weimar. Hilmes’s account of these two central relationships is one of his book’s strong points. He gives space ...”

“... years ago, an unintelligible frontispiece to a book published in 1807. The great German naturalist Alexander vonHumboldt came back from South America to produce a timeless masterpiece, The Geography of Plants; he had it prefaced with an engraving, a dedication to Goethe, in which a naked man with a lyre is lifting the ...”

“... theme, the precariousness of rationality. The evenly matched subjects of Measuring the World are Alexander vonHumboldt, born 1769, geographer, naturalist and explorer, notably of Latin America, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, born 1777, hardly less prodigious as a mathematician and inventor. At first the structure of the ...”

“... too: to the behaviour of light, heat and air. Staying for a couple of months in late 1802 in Lima, Alexander vonHumboldt grumbled about the city’s tedium, selfishness and indifference to suffering. Though he’d just climbed Chimborazo, then the highest recorded ascent, and happily surveyed the coastal guano ...”

“... research in Ladakh and Tibet. German scientists were equally well travelled: not only Alexander vonHumboldt, who pioneered ecological research in the Americas, but also Adolf Bastian, whose medical training and background – he was from a family of wealthy Bremen merchants – allowed him to spend eight ...”

“... The 19th was a century of letter-writers: as well as extraordinary correspondents like Alexander vonHumboldt, who is said to have written more than fifty thousand letters in his long life, millions of ordinary individuals could now send one another messages easily and economically. The British postal ...”

“... fictionalised double biography of the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the natural historian Alexander vonHumboldt; less obscure than Lasker and Schlechter, but similar cases of fierce intellect paired with social awkwardness. As a writer, Glavinic too is more interested in elegance than solutions. He is an ...”