I knew Anthony Burgess best during an intense seminar in Monte Carlo. In 1990, at the height of the Gabler-Kidd-Stephen Joyce controversy over the new Gabler text, Burgess had decided views which evolved and changed during the course of the deliberations. I was instrumental in bringing out that change and in recording his intelligent and […]
For me the beginning and the end of Burgess’s opus are represented by The Malayan Trilogy and Earthly Powers. Last things were one of his first and enduring concerns, though he never stinted on what went before. His first three novels, which comprise The Malayan Trilogy, are a hot, spicy curry; the ingredients include realism, […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is now 100 years since the birth, in Manchester, of a boy christened John Burgess Wilson, who at his confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church took the name of Anthony, patron saint of lost objects. About forty years later, he began to be modestly well known under the nom de plume of ‘Anthony Burgess’ […]