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Hello, my name's Ben Grant. I'm a lecturer in English literature at the Department for Continuing Education here at the University of Oxford.

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So is your job? I started in 2018, actually.

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This was a return at Oxford for me as I studied here in the early 1990s.

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I started a degree in biochemistry and in college I studied and was Trinity College, which is where we are now, sir, on the ground college.

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And one of the oldest ones, we are here in front of the imposing front gates of the college and Broad Street, which is right in the heart of Oxford.

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And we're not far from the old Lane library. We're here because the person I'd like to talk about also studied at Trinity College.

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And I actually wrote a book about him that I started that work before I realised we'd been to the same college.

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His name is Richard Francis Burton, and he was one of those larger than life Victorians.

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He worked as a spy in British India and he became famous as an explorer and a translator.

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He was also one of the foremost, if not the foremost linguists of his day.

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He is reported to know in 27 languages.

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Before all that, he'd spent his childhood on the continent, particularly in France and Italy, an expatriate British communities.

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So when he arrived in Oxford in 1840 at the age of 19, he'd actually spent very little of his life in Britain.

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Picture the scene in Britain, walks up to Trinity College gates on his first day, sporting Matt, sporting a magnificent moustache,

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which is all the rage in Europe, which would have been considered outlandish in Britain as he steps through the college entrance.

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He bumps into a group of fellow students and one of them laughs in his face, taken aback by his outlandish appearance.

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Burton promptly challenges this person, whom he describes as tall to a duel.

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And this is met with astonishment by the other students for whom duels were then only something to be found in history books and novels.

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They were still in Vogue in Europe. Well, think of the time to describe the scene,

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because I think the Capulets a great deal about Britain's experience of Oxford and indeed of the English society more broadly.

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Despite working for the British government and British institutions, stranger's life, Britain always remains something of an outsider in Britain.

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And he spent very little of his life there in the status of being different or something which Burton himself actively cultivated.

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And I suppose the most obvious expression of this is his famous journey to the weaselling holy sites of Mecca and Medina,

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disguised as a Muslim and his frequent praise for aspects of Islamic culture.

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But it should be said, though, that Britain combined this this obvious interest in other cultures.

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And he was very curious about other places and people with really very extreme form of racism, particularly towards Africans.

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Well, going back to Britain's time in Oxford, although, as I said,

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he was already at that time a consulate linguist and he's for numerous European languages.

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He wasn't able to develop those skills in Oxford.

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Like his moustache, he found his European pronunciation of Greek and Latin was laughed at by his tutors.

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I mean, he's tried to learn Arabic. He couldn't find anyone to teach him. Although Oxford prides itself on having had an Arabic professor since 16 36.

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The older of this post in 1840 wasn't really much of an Arabic scholar, and he refused to give birth and individual tuition.

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So Britain really struggled to to learn Arabic on his own.

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Well, after his first year at Oxford,

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Burton decided he'd had enough and he declared his family that he wanted to leave and join the army or to emigrate to Canada, Australia.

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However, his father was having none of this. So Burton contrived instead to have himself expelled.

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And he managed to do this eventually when he went to a horse race, which Trinity students had been prohibited from attending.

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And in typical Burton style, his leaving Trinity and Oxford was as theatrical as his arrival there.

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A friend from another college who'd been expelled at the same time came to pick Burton up from the college doors.

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And I quote Burton himself on what happened next with a cantering leader and a high trotting shaft horse,

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which unfortunately, unfortunately went over the beds of the best flowers.

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We started from the High Street by the Queen's Highway to London.

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I artistically performing upon a yard of tin trumpet, waving due to my friends and kissing my hand to the pretty shopgirl.

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Well, after leaving Oxford, Burton ended up taking off a commission in the East India Company Army in British India.

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And the rest, as they say, is history. I should say just to finish that I like Burton and also left Trinity without completing my degree.

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There will not, unfortunately, in his spectacular style as him.