'Discovering is mostly my mania', proclaimed Sir Richard Burton. Nevertheless, as Fawn Brodie shows in this splendid account of a 'Renaissance' Victorian, he wa soldier, poet, translator, ethnologist, amateur physician, botanist, zoologist and geologist as well. A celebrated swordsman and superb raconteur, he spoke forty different languages and dialects. And wherever he travelled in India, Arabia, Africa and America he assiduously compiled facts about the languages, habits and sexual customs of the people and tribes he met.

'No one could fail to write a good life of Sir Richard Burton..., but Fawn Brodie has written a brilliant one: her scholarship is wide and searching, and her understanding of Burton and his wife both deep and wide. She writes with clarity and zest' - J.H. Plumb