In early 1966 he intimated to his friend and colleague Charles Boxer that he would like to be considered for the Camões Chair of Portuguese at King’s College when he vacated the position. However, a different professor was appointed without considering other candidates, and given the former attitude of Salazar, Leitão suspected political intervention. On 16 February of the same year he was promoted to Officer of the Ordem Nacional do Cruzeiro do Sul for services rendered as Conservador, and on 22 December he was awarded the Bayer Prize for Journalism, for his article ‘Paixão de Cristo em Oberammergau’, concerning a performance of the passion play that he had watched in that Bavarian village over Easter. In February 1967 he began work for his study O Inventário dos Chafarizes Portugueses [Inventory of Portuguese Springs], making journeys around the country with his friend Francisco da Silva Fernandes, charged with taking photographs. The inventory was concluded in December 1969 and delivered to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, although it was never published.

Despite his frustration at not being able to return to England his intellectual output continued unabated, as is demonstrated by the not only by journeys he made for this work, but also by his articles published in the press, the lectures he delivered, and the fiction that he continued to produce. In 1968 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon (Classe de Letras – Secção de Ciências Históricas e Geográficas), and in 1969, when he celebrated twenty years of literary activity under the pen-name Ruben A. by giving a talk called ‘Prosa da Prosa’ at the German Institute, he became a numbered academic of the Academia Nacional da História, taking chair no. 9 from Afonso do Paço. On 6 July of the same year at the Festival de Ouro Preto, in Brazil, he gave lectures entitled ‘O Escritor Português e a Sua Expressão’ and ‘O Solar dos Brasis’, which were later repeated on 11 July, in Belo Horizonte, and on 23 July, in Rio de Janeiro. The high point of his engagement with Brazilian culture was his nomination, on 8 July 1975, as Honorary Lecturer of the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, in Rio de Janeiro. Despite being a critic of a certain Portuguese mentality, narrow-minded, secluded from the rest of the world, and choosing for its heroes long-dead people such as Luis de Camões, the nation’s greatest flag-bearer in the world, he was nevertheless invited, as representative of the Portuguese Academy of History, to take part in the National Commission for the Commemorations of the Fourth Centenary of the Publication of Os Lusíadas.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | (Pdf)