Word: ruffianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Scented Garden, an encyclopaedic sex manual whose translation from the Arabic had occupied Burton's last years (a partial version survived). Also into the flames went his private journal of 40 years, which he had kept under lock and key. This act left her free to clean up Ruffian Dick for the visitors and write a biography of "the most pure, the most refined and modest man that ever lived...
Through the years, memories of the bloody episodes have faded, and most Mexicans have romanticized Pancho's legend to make him out as an amiable ruffian who fought for the poor and humiliated the Yanquis. Former Dorados who organized as lobbying associations have pointed to his more glorious exploits. Last summer the Government named a dam in Durango after him. So it was only logical for someone to raise the question of why Pancho's name was not in gold letters in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, next to those of Zapata and the other official patriots. When...
...spent nine years rooting stones out of his New Hampshire pasture without any converse with the spirit world. There is a wonderful raspberry at Carl Sandburg ("His mandolin pleased some people, his poetry a very few and his infantile talk none. He is probably the most artificial and studied ruffian the world has had"). And in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, an astonishing admission in 1938: "Two years ago I wanted to be a Senator...
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...
...soon play tennis without a net." Asked whether literature was an escape, he snapped: "The weak think they are escaping; the strong think they are pursuing." In his latter-day person as unofficial poet laureate, he journeyed to Russia and talked to Khrushchev, whom he pronounced "a grand old ruffian," and added with characteristically evenhanded egotism: "We were charmed with each other. I could talk out to him, and he could talk...