Books: The Saga of Ruffian Dick

THE DEVIL DRIVES: A LIFE OF SIR RICHARD BURTON by Fawn M. Brodie. 390 pages. Norton. $6.95.

The Victorian age can now be seen as an outburst of bourgeois baroque—extravagant in form, larger than life, gaudy, ridiculous, but above all productive and resolutely confident. No man better personified this outburst than Explorer Richard Burton,* the magnifico of satanic mien who prowled through unmapped regions like a lion, visited the forbidden cities of Mecca, Medina and Harrar, and discovered Lake Tanganyika.

He could bandy quips with poets and wits in London and chat about women...

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