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’ […]

One of my favourite authors, the delightfully chaotic Anthony Burgess, bought a splendid old house in Lija, the village next to ours. With his lively second wife and their small son, he had now moved to Malta where, like me, he was enjoying the escape from city pressure. But there was one big difference between […]

Anthony Burgess is the greatest of Manchester’s writers, and if he possesses all our virtues, he more than shares our vices. A Mancunian who has made a splash in the arts or letters is automatically a public intellectual, at least in their own head. There is a loud, ostentatious intelligence to the city’s writers that […]

Knowing of his love for and great knowledge of music, I interviewed Anthony in 1968 for one of the first BBC films I ever made, All My Loving, which was essentially about ‘pop music’ and all that that entailed in the late 1960s. The Monterey Festival was behind us, and Woodstock still to come. But […]

In 1980 Anthony Burgess spent a week at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, delivering the John Crowe Ransom Memorial Lectures. As Editor of The Kenyon Review at that time, I spent a good deal of time talking with Anthony, but there are two stories that should be preserved. One afternoon at lunch, we were discussing […]

In 1974, when I was a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Birmingham University, pursuing a twin career as novelist and critic, I was invited by the British Council to do what they called a ‘Specialist Tour’ in  Italy, giving lectures at several universities. My itinerary began in Naples and ended in Milan, with […]

‘Religion is the oppressor. True, it has given us art, music, architecture of unsurpassable beauty, but that does not prevent it from being a roof over the heads of shivering people scared of engaging the huge windy blackness without. Man invented God because he knew no better – the great unpredictable father, indulgent or angry, […]

I remember both Anthony and Liana Burgess well and with affection. The first time I met Anthony Burgess was after the publication of his book A Shorter Finnegans Wake. I was then an undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin and presented a paper to the Philosophical Society about James Joyce circa 1964. Anthony Burgess was the […]

I first met Anthony in 1969 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He had been invited to lecture at Simon Fraser University. I was then on the faculty of Royal Roads in Victoria, a branch of the Royal Military College. His lecture was well attended, and he delighted the audience with accounts of his travels that had […]