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 […]
The Burgess Foundation’s archive collection is at the heart of what we do. The collection forms the core of our charitable mission to encourage interest in the life and work of Anthony Burgess. It’s important to us that as many people as possible access our collection, even when the building is closed. Whether you’re completing a […]
Our exhibition Anthony Burgess on Tape explores the audio collections at the Burgess Foundation. Some tapes include Anthony Burgess playing the piano, his favourite instrument. We investigate further. Anthony Burgess’s love for the piano was deep rooted. Burgess believed he had a musical background. His mother Elizabeth was (according to family legend) a singer and […]
Although A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’s best-known novel, many readers regard Earthly Powers as his masterpiece. When the novel was first published in October 1980, Burgess received a telegram from his French translator, who wrote: ‘It is your Ulysses.’ Unlike most of Burgess’s novels, which he wrote in the space of a few months, […]
It’s one thing to collate an archive collection: it’s another thing to preserve it. We explore some newly conserved books in our archive. Preserving and safeguarding the collection of books, archival records and objects belonging to Anthony Burgess is at the heart of the Burgess Foundation’s mission, and all those who access, manage and use […]
Raymond Yiu, composer of the song cycle The World Was Once All Miracle based on Anthony Burgess’s poems, describes his love for This Man and Music in this Q&A, exclusive to the Burgess Foundation and Manchester University Press. Tell us how you first came to Anthony Burgess’s This Man and Music. What impression did it […]
The audio archive at the Burgess Foundation comprises 1,094 cassettes and 87 reel-to-reel tapes. The recordings run to over a thousand hours, and include interviews with the media, public lectures, private telephone conversations, piano playing and poetry reading at home, domestic discussions, and sometimes street noises and birdsong. Other tapes contain classical music, obscure radio programmes, […]
Exploring the music referenced in the brand new Irwell Edition of Anthony Burgess’s This Man and Music. This Man and Music, Anthony Burgess’s reflections on music, literature and autobiography, references a varied selection of music from the expected, such as Beethoven and Mozart, through the modernist influences on Burgess’s own music such as Stravinsky and […]