A year before Anthony Burgess moved to Malta in 1968, he became involved in a controversy about the banning of books closer to home. On the question of whether or not books should be suppressed because they might incite people to commit crimes, he robustly came down on the side of free expression. The Moors […]
Aged 18, I spent a month in the village of Deià on the island of Majorca in the summer of 1969 where an American professor of English, Bob de Maria, from Dowling College, Long Island, founded and ran the Mediterranean Institute. Burgess was one of the guest writers, as was Colin Wilson, who, at the […]
In 1968, Anthony Burgess sold his properties in Chiswick and Etchingham and moved to Malta. The journey to his new home was undertaken by road, in a Bedford Dormobile driven by his new wife, Liana. As they drove south across Europe, Burgess sat in the back of the motor-caravan with his typewriter. Later he wrote: […]
Our new exhibition reconstructs the collection of ‘indecent’ books owned by Anthony Burgess and destroyed by the Maltese government. In October 1968 Anthony Burgess married his second wife, Liana Macellari, and they decided to leave England for good. They bought an eighteenth-century palazzo in Malta and decided to begin a new life there. They packed […]
As well as being a prolific novelist, Anthony Burgess had a ceaseless energy for writing journalism. Because of a faulty diagnosis of a fatal brain tumour in 1959, Burgess was determined to make a living from writing, and it was clear that being a novelist alone was not the way to do this. Writing 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 […]
In April 1970, Lawrence Durrell came to Princeton to read. I talked with him at dinner and found him a midget with a monumental ego – his brother got him right in My Family and Other Animals. He thought the greatest benefit from a public-school education was the ability to stay calm and collected amid […]
John Anthony Burgess Wilson was a genius when it came to inventing himself. Born into a working-class family in Manchester, he educated himself by reading widely, taught himself how to compose music, and got himself into university. He served in the British Army during the Second World War, and afterwards became a school teacher in […]
I knew Anthony Burgess, in a passing sort of way, first, when he was the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1969-70. I had just begun my doctoral studies in English and lived with a number of other Jesuits who were pursuing degrees at either Chapel Hill or nearby Duke […]