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In his book The Merchant Banker (1966) the late Joseph Wechsberg – musician, polymath, gourmand, and correspondent for the New Yorker – devoted his final chapter to the Rothschilds. The Merchant Banker is an interesting book, full of insights, but in the end the Rothschilds defeat even Wechsberg. "The Rothschild legend," he writes, "has long ago outrun the facts." Some dynasties persist. The Rothschilds transcend.

The name Rothschild means, roughly, in German, "red shield" – historians speculate that a red shield may have hung at the gate of the family house in Frankfurt. The first notable Rothschild was Mayer Amschel, born in Frankfurt in 1743/44. He was a dealer in rare coins, medals, antiques and curiosities. With his wife, Gutle, he had many children, 10 of whom survived, including five sons: Nathan, James, Salomon, Amschel, and Carl. As Mayer's family grew, so did his business. He started extending credit to his customers, then dabbling in foreign currency trading and in government loans. By the beginning of the 19th century he was very wealthy. And he was no longer an antiques dealer. He was a banker.

Mayer and Gutle's children fanned out across Europe: Nathan to London; James to Paris; Salomon to Vienna; Carl to Naples; Amschel, the eldest, stayed in Frankfurt. The boys traded. They built railways. They invested in gold and precious metals. And they specialised in lending money to governments. "There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild," wrote a French journalist in 1841.

There have been many exceptional Rothschilds – too many to mention. Even Niall Ferguson's massive biography of the family, The House of Rothschild, only begins to tell the story. Apart from the bankers, there was Charlotte de Rothschild (1819-1884) who founded the Home for Aged Incurables and the Jews' Emigration Society; Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812-1870), who bought the land near Bordeaux that became the Château Mouton Rothschild vineyards; and Arthur de Rothschild (1851-1903), a philatelist.

Among the English branch, perhaps the most intriguing are Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937), a zoologist who set up a vast private natural history museum at his home at Tring Park, Hertfordshire, and his younger brother Charles (1877-1923), a banker and conservationist who killed himself after contracting encephalitis.

Charles's children included Miriam Rothschild (1908-2005), a pioneering naturalist, entomologist and vegetarian, who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley, and who was the first woman to be a trustee of the British Museum. She also set up the Schizophrenia Research Fund.

Miriam's brother Victor (1910-1990) played county cricket for Northamptonshire, was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a zoologist, a book collector, director of research at Shell, chairman of NM Rothschild & Sons, and a friend of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

During the second world war, Victor was responsible for testing the gifts sent to Churchill for poisons and explosives. His published scientific work include Fertilization (1956) and A Classification of Living Animals (1961).

Miriam's sister Pannonica (1913-1988), named after a moth discovered by her father, was a keen aviator who became known as the Jazz Baroness after she moved to New York in the 1950s and befriended jazz musicians including Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. (Parker died in her apartment.) Horace Silver's Nica's Dream is dedicated to Pannonica. This summer, Nat Rothschild, scion of the dynasty, held a lavish 40th birthday party in Montenegro. Guests included Peter Mandelson and Novak Djokovic.

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