![]() ![]() Being non-English was good for the role as Burton only lived in England for 5 years of his entire 69-year life and was never really comfortable with the place. Burton was played by Dubliner Patrick Bergin. Iain Glen I’ve always really liked, especially after seeing him play a squaddie at the Royal Court in Jim Cartwright’s brilliantly staged ‘ Road‘. I only saw this movie once, when it came out in 1990. He spoke some 25 languages fluently (humbling for an Oxbridge linguist like myself), including Arabic, which he taught himself at Oxford (before being kicked out in his fifth term) and which enabled him to spend six months in disguise as an Arab, infiltrating Mecca at pain of death for any slip. ![]() The main one exhibited here is of Burton going undercover to Mecca as an Arab to become the first white man to reach the heart of the Hajj. I imagine these artists are now far more recognised, whereas back then they were largely taken-for-granted commercial illustrators. The illustrations are magnificent, in the same way as those of Ladybird Books and Airfix model boxes were. We were born the same year and I too remember the thrill of receiving this educational magazine for young people, as well as TV 21 (an even bigger thrill, centred on the creations of Gerry Anderson). Shanty, whose labour of love the Sir Richard Burton Museum is, has been obsessed with Burton’s extraordinary life and story since he was 14 and got this magazine excitedly among his parents’ incoming newspapers. Original illustrations of Burton from Look & Learn magazine Erotic and Victorian didn’t make easy bedfellows. The manuscript all the more valuable as his wife, Isabel, (played by Fiona Shaw in the film, who I found myself standing next to on stage recently at the Festival Hall in the winners’ group photo at the TV BAFTAs) burnt many of his manuscripts in the wake of his death, in particular his just finished translation of the erotic classic from Arabia ‘The Perfumed Garden’. He had 11 desks in his massive study in Trieste in his latter years, each with a different literary or scholarly project upon it. ![]() Evidently worked on on at least four occasions with different writing implements. Written in his dense scrawl, the small page completely covered in script at various angles in ink and pencil. He was about to be taken apart in public by a highly charismatic man of action cum scholar. The RGS funded Burton & Speke’s expedition and hosted the subsequent contentious debate between Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke about the true source of the Nile – a debate which never happened as Speke died on its eve of gunshot wounds very likely to have been self-inflicted. Half way through he came back in with a silver pot of mint tea.īurton’s actual Founder’s Medal from the Royal Geographic Society My host, Shanty, a professional storyteller, set playing a very well put-together tape which lasted about an hour. ![]() On the walls of this small room were 28 exhibits. Faint echoes of Leighton House in London where I used to give art historical tours for charity – Burton brought back Middle Eastern tiles for painter Sir Frederic Leighton’s house and studio in Holland Park. I was welcomed and shown into a small, square backroom, done up with hints of Arabian style. The front door of a quiet back terrace house was ajar and in I walked to someone’s home. ![]()
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