Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The novel which exerted the strongest influence on Anthony Burgess’s literary work is undoubtedly Ulysses by James Joyce, which he first read as […]
To celebrate the reopening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, we look at Burgess’s identity as a Mancunian. Anthony Burgess left Manchester in 1940 and returned frequently in later years. The city and its people appear many times in Burgess’s writing — Manchester accents, landmarks, and even smells pervade his literary work. Remembering […]
Our Inside The Archive blog series casts new light onto the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we take a leaf from Anthony Burgess’s notebooks. Fourteen of Anthony Burgess’s diaries and notebooks survive in the collections at the Burgess Foundation, containing fragmentary but intriguing manuscript material dating from 1940 to 1977. Burgess was not an […]
10 June 2020 is the fiftieth anniversary of Burgess’s famous lecture, ‘Obscenity and the Arts’, which was delivered to a large audience at the University of Malta in Valletta. In this blog, we look back on the story of Burgess’s lecture and the events which provoked it. In November 1968, Burgess and his new […]
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 […]
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 […]
Born in 1917, Anthony Burgess would have celebrated his 103rd birthday on 25 February 2020. But what did he think the twenty-first century would be like? It is possible to offer an answer to this question, thanks to a newly-discovered document from the archive. Back in the mists of 1984, the year when Anthony Burgess […]
The re-release of the Clockwork Orange film in the United Kingdom (on 5 April 2019) provides an opportunity to revisit the turbulent history of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation, which was first shown in New York in December 1971, with the British and European premieres taking place in January 1972. To many people in Britain, Kubrick’s […]
1. A Clockwork Orange was not the original title of the novel. In Anthony Burgess’s diary for 1958, he begins a plan for the novel that would eventually become A Clockwork Orange. It appears he originally intended the novel to be titled The Plank in Your Eye, an allusion to Matthew’s Gospel. During the Sermon […]
ONE: He received a fan letter from Umberto Eco. They met when Burgess was living in Rome in the early 1970s. Eco, who worked as a radio producer, interviewed Burgess in connection with Joysprick, a book about the language of James Joyce. Later on, Burgess wrote favourable reviews of a number of Eco’s books, including The […]