This Man And Music: A Review

As Christine Lee Gengaro, editor of the new Irwell Edition of This Man and Music, points out, ‘The book might more accurately have been called This Man, Music, and Literature, or Music, Literature, and This Man. But as it stands, the title This Man and Music is misleading.’ Indeed it is, for less than a […]

Anthony Burgess collections around the world

The Burgess Foundation is not the only archive dedicated to the work of Anthony Burgess. We cast our eye further afield to Burgess collections elsewhere. Harry Ransom Center card catalog (pic: University of Texas at Austin) Given Anthony Burgess’s peripatetic existence and his international appeal, it is perhaps no surprise that the Burgess Foundation’s collection […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Tremor of Intent

In 1965, the year before Burgess published his spy novel, Tremor of Intent, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels sold more than 15 million paperback copies in the UK alone. Given the vast enthusiasm for espionage fiction on the part of the book-buying public, it’s understandable that Burgess was keen to cash in on this publishing […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Extracts from Anthony Burgess’s Sonata in H

The actor Paul Barnhill reads extracts from ‘Sonata in H’, a reflection on the atomic age, written by Anthony Burgess while he was living in Adderbury, Oxfordshire, in the 1950s. The complete text of this long poem will be published by Incline Press in 2021. The video was recorded in July 2020 at the International […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Honey for the Bears and the Cold War

Near the beginning of Honey for the Bears, Anthony Burgess’s 1963 novel set in Leningrad, there is a reference to the Cambridge spies: Not everything you do has to be political. Like those diplomats that went over that time. For all anybody knows they might have gone over because of their stomachs. In Russia, nobody […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: The Monster We’ve Learned to Live With

Anthony Burgess published this essay to mark the fortieth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima in August 1985. It is reprinted here as part of our online series ‘Burgess and the Atomic Age’, which includes poetry, performance and new articles. The Emperor Hirohito accepted the Allied terms on 14 August 1945, and Japan’s formal surrender […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Sonata in H

When the atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, more than 140,000 people lost their lives, either in the blast itself or as a result of radiation sickness afterwards. This catastrophic event inaugurated a new era in world history and politics. From 1945 onwards, everyone would be living in the shadow […]

Inside the archive: Anthony Burgess and his typewriters

Of the hundreds of objects belonging to Burgess in the Foundation’s archive, there are some which, more or less without fail, are guaranteed to evoke an immediate response from visitors — none more so than Anthony Burgess’s typewriters, some of which are on display in the reading room. Burgess had a particularly close association with […]

Say it, Cecil! : the musicals of Earthly Powers

We’ve been so busy exploring the works of the writer Anthony Burgess that we feel we’ve ignored the works of another great writer: Kenneth Toomey, the playwright protagonist of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. One of Burgess’s themes in Earthly Powers is the distance between artistic integrity and commercial success. His protagonist Kenneth Toomey harbours ambitions to […]

A class act: Anthony Burgess at City College New York

When Anthony Burgess joined City College New York in 1972 for a year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, it is not clear that he knew what he was letting himself in for. Burgess had previously taught at a number of elite American universities, including the University of North Carolina […]

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