Complications started with Liana, his wife, who had given a slightly different date of death for Anthony to the press. Eventually, the two or three days of difference in the date were sorted out by one of the newspapers (it was Toni Howard of the obituary department of the London Times, in fact). Then, she […]
Anthony (John to us) was my tutor of Language and Literature at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College for Teachers, near Preston, in its final year ending in May 1950. I worked closely with him as actor, stage manager, and producer in many college Dramatic productions, and acted as Methusela in his production of Nigel Balchin’s […]
When you exhume a Sicilian who has been in the grave for 2000 years, he’ll tell you vaffanculo and then he’ll rather self-pityingly say: ‘Why did you wake me? I haven’t finished plotting my revenge yet.’ I rather think if we dug up Anthony Burgess, we would get something similar. He was colour blind, which […]
He wasn’t exactly what we expected. No, my brothers. He was not like Alex, nor even like one of his three droogs. ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,’ he began reading to us. Flashbulbs popped. The New York Times. […]
It seems a little greedy, when Anthony Burgess finished and published so many wonderful novels, to want more. And yet, prolific as he was, he left a whole host of brilliant ideas for books unwritten on his death. Some of these are sketched in his two-volume autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God and You’ve Had […]
I went to see Anthony Burgess in the aftermath of A Clockwork Orange. I can’t remember exactly when: but I have the impression that the movie had come out, had incited vociferous opposition, and Burgess was anxious to ‘put things right.’ He was staying in Grosvenor House hotel – or, maybe, the Dorchester: anyhow one […]
Burgess was always courteous and kind; the fact we enjoyed each other’s writing helped a great deal. When Burgess’s early novels of what were later called The Malayan Trilogy were published, I had only recently returned from that exotic region myself. Not only were Time for a Tiger and the others extremely funny, Burgess showed […]
Direct from a sold-out, award-winning London run, director Alexandra Spencer-Jones’s electrifying, critically-acclaimed stage production of A Clockwork Orange will premiere in New York City this fall in a limited Off-Broadway engagement at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street). Jonno Davies, who led the London cast, will make his New York stage debut in the lead role of […]
I first met Anthony Burgess on Election Night 1966. As the then editor of the Penguin English Library I had commissioned him to write the introduction to one of the classic English novels. We met in the bar of the Café Royal. Burgess arrived with his then wife, Lynne. We chatted pleasantly for a while […]
Harold Harris, now dead, originally brought Burgess to Hutchinson for Beard’s Roman Women in about 1975 or 76. Possibly bought from an American publisher. In those days I don’t think Anthony was using a literary agent. My memory of this was that the photographer was very much part of the deal, and that it was […]