The Collector of Worlds
By Iliya Troyanov
Translated by William Hobson
Faber £16.99 464 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

Explorers – of places, cultures and languages – are remembered for what they bring back, and Richard Francis Burton is one for all ages. His English translations of The Kama Sutra and The Thousand and One Nights were the first of their kind; his account of making hajj may not have been the first by a European but was certainly the most vivid. And his expedition to the African great lakes yielded maps and anthropological detail that would prove priceless to others following in his footsteps.