Baron Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford Redesdale

Born in London in 1837, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford before entering the Foreign Office in 1858. His diplomatic career took him to St Petersburg, Peking, and then Japan, where he served with the British legation during a period of major political change.

That experience shaped the book for which he is still best known, Tales of Old Japan. Blending translations, retellings, and observations, it became one of the best-known English books about Japan in the nineteenth century and remains closely associated with his name.

Later in life he inherited the Redesdale title and became 1st Baron Redesdale. Alongside public service, he was known as a collector and man of wide interests, and he died in 1916. He is also remembered today as the grandfather of the Mitford sisters, though his own reputation rests mainly on his writing and his years as a diplomat abroad.