Tristram Hunt

Ignore the activists – Humboldt’s Enlightenment project deserves celebrating

V&A's director Tristram Hunt goes in search of the Berliner who inspired Albertopolis

The new Humboldt Forum on Berlin’s Museum Island. Credit: © SHF/Christoph Musiol 
issue 09 January 2021
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‘What a loss is the excellent Humboldt. You and Berlin will both miss him greatly,’ Prince Albert wrote to his much-beloved daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, on news of the death of the author, explorer and celebrity Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. ‘People of this kind do not grow upon every bush [‘an den Blumen’] and they are the grace and glory of a country and a century.’

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