Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Radcliffe girl, her intelligence tends to emancipate her from traditional values. "When you're in love, it's all right" is becoming the new dictum. She attributes this trend in part to today's "sex-tittillating" society. "Ten years ago, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor would have taken separate hotel suites...
Unhappily, both sides lost. During most of his scandalous and strenuous lifetime, Britain slighted Burton and Burton sneered at Britain. The eldest son of a prominent English family, he had the dark good looks, the brilliance and the energy to become one of the legendary men of his age. He made himself one of the greatest linguists in British history, was able to pass as a native in 29 languages. As an unofficial intelligence officer for the Indian army, he had submerged himself for months in the native population of Sind, collecting volumes of notes on everything from secret tribal...
Copulating Crocodiles. Despite all this, "Ruffian Dick" and the "White Nigger" were the epithets that polite London society applied to Burton; and Her Majesty's government all but ignored his fantastic, if sometimes freakish, feats. Official distaste began when Burton wrote a detailed study of pederasty among the natives. He was promptly blackballed from future promotion in the British Indian Army. Thereafter, he never rose above the rank of captain or progressed beyond minor consular appointments in a belated career in the British foreign service...
Much of the public slighting of Burton was unjust-the pederasty study, for instance, had been suggested to him as a serious project by his commander, General Sir Charles Napier. Yet it is difficult to see Burton as a man more sinned against than sinning. For one thing, as Author Farwell blandly puts it, "the only vice he did not practice was gambling." For another, Burton, who always referred to the proper British public contemptuously as "Mrs. Grundy," goaded the good lady abominably. On rare visits back to England he delighted in describing imaginary feasts at which...
...Marble Tent. Most of Burton's more than 50 volumes are all but unreadable today, mainly because he never edited them. But nearly every volume contains sprightly and fascinating passages. Whatever his official subject, Burton always spun off ideas that were often visionary and sometimes prophetic...