As we continue to explore our collections with our Inside The Archive blog series, we load up the video player to watch Anthony Burgess on film. Anthony Burgess was one of the first novelists to embrace the medium of television and appeared on the small screen many times throughout his career. As well as becoming […]

Breaking news: As part of our ongoing ‘Inside the Archive’ series, we dig into Anthony Burgess’s journalistic career — and his attitude towards it. The journalism collection at the Burgess Foundation contains more than three thousand reviews and essays. There are pieces by Anthony Burgess from the very beginnings of his writing career to the […]

One of the most fascinating, yet underexplored, areas of the Burgess Foundation’s archive is its object collection. The collection consists of furniture, musical instruments, typewriters, crockery, glassware, awards, artwork, ornaments, and other collectibles that belonged to Burgess and his family and were gathered throughout their travels in Europe, Malaysia, and America. Many individual pieces are […]

The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD student Sam Jermy writes about his work on Burgess and Shakespeare, and his new research project with the Foundation. Anthony Burgess was continually interested and engaged with the writing, world and life of William Shakespeare. This creative engagement was sustained throughout […]

You may have seen his piano, but Anthony Burgess owned many more instruments. This trip into the Burgess archive’s musical instrument collection reveals all. Regular visitors to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester will be familiar with three of the more substantial pieces in our musical instrument collection, which are on permanent display: a […]

Andrew Biswell: How to read Earthly Powers ‘The ideal reader of my books,’ Anthony Burgess told John Cullinan of the Paris Review in 1973, ‘is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.’ Readers who lack those […]

We take a closer look – and listen – to Anthony Burgess record collection held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation The vinyl collection at the Burgess Foundation contains a huge variety of records all owned and collected by Anthony Burgess and his family. This important resource tells us much about Burgess’s listening habits, and […]

Anthony Burgess: Everyone’s Free … Except Me: One Man’s View from the Barrack Room An edited version of this article was published in the Daily Mail on 8 May 1985 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of VE Day. The complete text, reproduced here, appears in the Irwell Edition of A Vision of Battlements (Manchester University Press, […]

As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, we look at Burgess’s attitude towards Somerset Maugham. When Anthony Burgess began his career as a novelist, inspired by his experience of teaching English in colonial Malaya, his goal was to become a sort of Somerset Maugham figure. In particular, he wanted to emulate Maugham’s […]

The new single by music producer and composer Sebastian Reynolds has a particularly Burgessian inspiration. In a guest post for our blog, Sebastian Reynolds writes about The Universe Remembers. The Universe Remembers, single taken from the EP, The Universe Remembers, released via Faith & Industry records My new single The Universe Remembers originally came about after […]