The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was once the most famous man in Europe bar Napoleon. And if you judge a man by his friends (as you should), how about Goethe, Schiller, Simon Bolivar, Cuvier, Lamarck, Laplace, Guy-Lussac and Jefferson? And that is only the start of the supper list.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £21.00. Tel: 08430 600033. Redmond O’Hanlon’s books include Charles Darwin and In Trouble Again: A Journey between the Orinoco and the Amazon.
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