In 1997 he gave the Jefferson lecture, the US government's highest honour for intellectual achievement in the humanities.
A woman can be honoured for her intellectual gifts, it seems, but it is always better if she is pretty.
Best known for creating the Baygen wind-up radio, Mr Baylis was honoured for services to intellectual property.
Honour: CBE for services to intellectual property.
In particular, Ibn Saʿūd, the tribal leader who formed the modern state of Saudi Arabia, received Rihani with honours as a major Arab intellectual, and they began a long correspondence and friendship.
Here Benjamin mocks intellectuals who "make it a point of honour to be wholly themselves on every issue", refusing to understand that to succeed they have to present different faces to different audiences.
So when the University of Chicago, whose economics department has been an incubator for the free-market creed, announced in May that a new institute would be named in his honour, it set off a fierce intellectual skirmish.
Camilleri named his detective in honour of the Spanish writer and intellectual Manuel Vázquez Montalban, who created his own gastronome-private eye in Pepe Carvalho, a weary, sardonic Catalan with a penchant for rice dishes and a good recipe for fish stew.
Hitchens was never a Stalinist, but he stayed loyal to an intellectual Trotskyist view of the Bolshevik revolution, which honoured Lenin and blamed Stalin for deforming the revolution into a state-capitalist dictatorship.
For the last 20 years of his life he was also one of Britain's most eminent public intellectuals, awarded the order of the companions of honour by Tony Blair.
