From 1976, Anthony Burgess lived in a top-floor apartment on rue Grimaldi in Monaco. In 1988, there was an ingress of water from the roof of the building, which partly destroyed Burgess’s collection of manuscripts. According to a letter in the Burgess Foundation’s archive, the papers were being stored in a spare bathroom. Shortly after […]

This sketch by the Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli was drawn for Anthony Burgess’s son, Andrew (also known as Paolo Andrea). It appears to be a greeting for Easter 1979, and shows a recipe for a desert called ‘the sweet of “Passion”’. Zeffirelli describes it as an ‘Easter offering’. The ingredients include ricotta cheese, pistachios, […]

This recording of Anthony Burgess reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’ is part of Burgess’s private audio collection. It was originally part of a larger recording intended to accompany Burgess’s book They Wrote In English (1979), written for Italian student of English Literature. The recording fell out of circulation shortly after it was produced. […]

In 1986 Anthony Burgess published The Pianoplayers, a ribald, light-hearted story about the picaresque adventures of Ellen Henshaw and her dissolute pianoplayer father, Billy, in the silent cinemas and pubs of Manchester and Blackpool in the 1920s. Drawing on the circumstances of Burgess’s family life, the novel balances its portrayal of the poverty and deprivation […]

Anthony Burgess often worked with visual artists, most notably with novels The Eve of St Venus (1964) and A Vision of Battlements (1965), both of which were illustrated by Edward Pagram. Other works, such as Beard’s Roman Women (1976) and Shakespeare (1970) were illustrated with photographs and, in the case of his biography of Shakespeare, […]

It is unusual for a literary archive to contain such a wide range of items as those which appear in the Burgess Foundation’s collection. One of the most surprising discoveries is that there are several bottles of wine stored among the manuscript pages, photographs and books. More surprising still is that the wines have remained undrunk. The bottles which survive […]

Many of the manuscripts in the archives at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation contain more than just words or music. Burgess was a prolific artist, drawing in the margins of typescripts, creating title pages for drafts of his novels, and sketching birthday cards for his son, Andrew. Burgess’s first published piece of work was not […]

Anthony Burgess’s copy of Italian Food by Elizabeth David is battered, ripped and stained, suggesting heavy use. It also contains scraps of paper which mark certain recipes, giving an insight into what Burgess may have been cooking. Burgess’s edition of Italian Food was published by Penguin in 1967, and there is internal evidence that he […]

Many items in the collections at the Anthony Burgess Foundation reveal Burgess’s connections with other writers. Some of these connections are unexpected, such as his long correspondences with Angela Carter and Shirley Conran, but some, such as his friendship with the Italian novelist and semiologist Umberto Eco, seem to make more sense. Burgess’s and Eco’s […]

In 1980, Anthony Burgess was recruited by the producer Michael Gruskoff to invent a new language for the Ulam tribe of prehistoric people in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire. The film is set 80,000 years ago, and tells the story of a primitive tribe’s efforts to guard their precious fire, something which they know how […]