Richard Burton was one of Victorian Britain's most protean figures. A soldier, explorer, ethnographer, and polyglot of rare power, as well as a poet, travel writer, and translator of the "Tales of the Arabian Nights" and the "Kama Sutra", Burton exercised his abundant talents in a diverse array of endeavours. Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Burton travelled so widely, wrote so prolifically, and contributed so forcefully to his generation's most contentious debates that he provides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of the Victorians.