British explorer, traveller, diplomat, scholar and orientalist. Sir Richard Burton was a prolific author of books and articles on travel, fencing and ethnography. His translations of Arabic and Indian titles brought now-famous works of erotica to an English-reading public for the first time, including The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night (popularly known as The Arabian Nights) and the Kama Sutra. The appendix to The Book of One Thousand Nights (The Sotadic Zone of Sexual Inversion, when published separately) and the translation of the Kama Sutra were prohibited entry to Australia for much of the twentieth century.
