In 1983 I was a member of the committee that organised the Meet the Author strand of the first Edinburgh Book Festival. How we succeeded in attracting Anthony Burgess I cannot remember. I suspect our secretary, Janis Adams, simply wrote him a letter of invitation and he signalled his willingness to attend. He had been […]
SUNDAY 2 JULY 2017 19:00: Welcome Event and Drinks Reception Join us at the Burgess Foundation for the launch of The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess. MONDAY 3 JULY 2017 9:00-10:00: Panel 1 Simon Johnson, ‘The Beautiful Belle Burgess: A Biographical Study of Elizabeth Burgess’ Will Carr, ‘Anthony Burgess’s Blackpool’ 10:00-10:10: Break […]
Monday 19 October 1992 Start the Week, on a cold Monday morning. This morning I have two massive egos to lock horns with — Anthony Burgess and Broadway director Hal Prince. We’re to be given 15 minutes each and the thought of Burgess and Prince having to stop what they’re doing and listen to me […]
Burgess was a titan of literature and I believe that his divers canon of work will one day be recognised for what it is – the unique outpourings of an erudite and catholic writer who annoyed the literary mafia by the sheer fecundity of his mind. They could not slot him into a particular pigeon […]
Anthony Burgess was everything Iris Murdoch wasn’t, far away from the twitterings of yesterday’s Senior Common Room and the British literary establishment. Northern, Catholic, something of an outsider, he wasn’t just a linguistic virtuoso but an anti-Puritan, the most humane of curmudgeons, and a reactionary of vision. A Clockwork Orange seems so mutated out of […]
I first began reading Burgess in my teens, in the late 70s, picking up paperbacks of The Doctor is Sick and Honey for the Bears and then became mildly obsessed with him over the next ten years or so. I collected as many of his books as I could and even kept a scrapbook of […]
When I became Assistant Editor (Features) of The [London] Times in 1981, I was delighted to inherit Anthony Burgess as a weekly columnist. We never knew what would be coming next from Monte Carlo; he was the only Times columnist who was immune to any staff briefing, even a telephone chat over the issues of […]
Anthony Burgess is a brilliant English novelist. I remember feeling greatly pleased on reading a review he did for the Observer on my fourth novel, The Secret Ladder from the Guyana Quartet. This happened some time before we met. I mention this now as a token of the generous, unobtrusive approach he made to […]
One of the highlights of the 2017 Manchester International Festival will be a new artists’ film, based on two of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby novels, which will be screened as part of an exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester between 30 June and 16 July. Details of this free exhibition are available here. The […]
The Centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth has inspired many commemorations around the world, especially in the place he lived. Monaco is celebrating its connection with Burgess with a new commemorative stamp. Monaco was Burgess’s home from 1975 to 1993, a relatively settled period of his life in which he lived with his wife Liana and […]