1. Michael Jackson recorded an album with David Gest setting Robert Burns’ poems to music.
2. Burns’ work has appeared in hundreds of films and television programmes, including It’s a Wonderful Life, When Harry met Sally, and Sex and the City.
3. He managed to have 12 children by four different women even though he died at was 37 following a dental extraction in 1795.
4. John Steinbeck took the title of his book Of Mice and Men from Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse’ – ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men’ while JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is based on the poem ‘Comin Thro the Rye’.
5. Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger is the great, great, great nephew of Robert Burns.
6. Burns was the first-ever person to be featured on a commemorative bottle of Coca Cola.
7. Other than Queen Victoria and Christopher Columbus, Robert Burns is the most popular non-religious statue around the world, with more than 50 memorials dedicated to him around the world.
8. President Abraham Lincoln was a huge Burns fan and even claimed the poems helped him to win the Civil War and abolish slavery.
9. Chinese resistance fighters used the translation of ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ as their marching song during the Second World War.
10. The legendary Burns’ poem ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is the third most popular song in the English language behind ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’.
See the original article in SOURCE, Scotland’s Number One Student Magazine.