Beard’s Roman Women is an odd book. The title, changed by the American publisher from Rome in the Rain, seems to suggest a historical novel, set in the Roman Empire. The text is partnered with strange photographs of ghostly Roman monuments, reflected in puddles and in glass. The story is clearly autobiographical yet is told […]
The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, published in hardback by Manchester University Press, is a new series which aims to bring all of Burgess’s novels and non-fiction books back into print. Each volume contains an editor’s introduction, a newly edited text, extensive notes and annotations, plus previously unpublished materials drawn from the […]
‘The history of England, from the time of the Roman occupation until twenty years ago, has been about the insistence of a very insular people on cutting itself off from that huge and dangerous continent that lies to its east and is separated by a mere twenty miles of sea’ (Anthony Burgess, ‘England in Europe’, […]
Sir Vidia Naipaul, who has died at the age of 85, was one of the foremost English-language writers of the late twentieth century. A novelist, memoirist and travel writer, he scoured the globe in search of resonant stories, which he told in a variety of different narrative forms. Born into an Indian family at Chaguanas […]
We are very sad to learn that the writer Geoffrey Aggeler has died in Santa Barbara at the age of 78. Professor Aggeler was a central figure in the first generation of Burgess scholarship. He was the author of Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (1979) and editor of Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess (1986). […]
In the final months of 1985, to mark the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth, Burgess wrote the Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard, a modern tribute to Bach’s esteemed and influential Well-Tempered Clavier. Both compositions consist of 24 preludes and fugues, one for every major and minor key. Burgess stands in a long tradition of composing music in […]
The script for A Clockwork Orange was first published in 1987, written by Anthony Burgess ‘to stem the flow of amateur adaptations’ that followed the publication of his novel in 1962. Nick Bagnall’s production at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, is a slick, shocking and well-executed show, based on Burgess’s script and using his original musical […]
When J.S. Bach completed the first collection of Preludes and Fugues that comprised the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722, his aim was mostly pedagogical. He followed the first volume with a second about two decades later. Although compiling a collection of pieces that systematically worked through each of the 24 major and minor keys wasn’t a […]
A new exhibition at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation explores the connections between Anthony Burgess and Riddley Walker with artworks by Sam Meech. On its first publication in 1980, Anthony Burgess said of Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker that ‘this is what literature is meant to be’. Set in a post-apocalyptic future two thousand years after […]
To celebrate the 101st anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s birth, we present a brand new discovery from our archive. Here is a rare recording of author Anthony Burgess singing. This is Burgess himself sitting at the piano, and the song is ‘The Young May Moon’, composed in 1807 and set to an old Irish tune. Dublin […]