Object of the Week: The Midsummer Night’s Dream Show

In 1972, Burgess collaborated with the composer Stanley Silverman on a version of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minnesota. This production, notable for Burgess’s invention of language based on Indo-European, premiered that year, and was revived in 2017 as a radio play on BBC Radio 3. Oedipus the King was […]

Object of the Week: A Letter From Len Deighton

This letter hints at the mutual respect and admiration between Anthony Burgess and Len Deighton. The letter is a response to Burgess’s review of Deighton’s SS-GB in the Observer (27 August 1978), a review that praises the novel as ‘one of Deighton’s best’. Of the author himself, Burgess writes: ‘Apart from his virtues as a […]

Object of the Week: Burgess’s Copy of Collected Poems by T.S. Eliot

Anthony Burgess bought this copy of Collected Poems 1909-35 by T.S. Eliot in 1936 on a trip to London with his father. He recalls the occasion in Little Wilson and Big God (1987): ‘I took the train from Euston and read through T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-35, which I had bought in Charing Cross Road. […]

Object of the Week: Burgess’s Leather-Bound Copy of Earthly Powers

Earthly Powers (1980) was Burgess’s attempt to write a novel that could display his literary artistry, the intention being something he compares to Ford Madox Ford’s desire when he set out to write The Good Soldier (1915). The novel tells the story of Kenneth Toomey, a homosexual author who is reminiscing about his life. It’s […]

Object of the Week: the Chatsky Manuscript

  Chatsky, or The Importance of Being Stupid is Burgess’s translation of Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov’s play Gore ot Uma (Woe Out of Wit), and is one of the last pieces of work he undertook. Burgess completed the translation around Easter 1991, but would have to wait until 11 March 1993 for it to be performed […]

Object of the Week: Burgess’s Grammy Nomination

Anthony Burgess was nominated for a Grammy in 1974 for his work on the musical version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. He shared the honour with his collaborator Michael J Lewis, a Welsh composer of music for film and theatre. Burgess was originally commissioned to translate Cyrano de Bergerac by the Tyrone Guthrie Theater […]

Object of the Week: The Eyes of New York

The Burgess Foundation’s archive includes a collection of audio recordings and films which exist in media such as Super 8, VHS and reel-to-reel audio tape. While some of this material has been digitised to allow easier access for researchers, other parts of the collection are still in their original formats. One intriguing item is a […]

Object of the Week: Burgess’s Copy of It Can’t Happen Here

Burgess’s inscribed copy of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) displays the tag-line ‘The Ultimate Triumph of the Silent Majority’, something that indicates the novel’s relevance today. Burgess says in The Novel Now (1967), the book proves that ‘America can have its own bad dreams’, with antagonist Senator ‘Buzz’ Windrip securing presidential victory, dissolving […]

Object of the Week: A Book in a Box

In 1975, Anthony Burgess was approached by Richard-Gabriel Rummonds to provide an original piece of writing for a new publication. Rummond’s Plain Wrapper Press was based in Verona, Italy, and was well regarded as a publisher of fine-press books, especially after the success of Jorge Luis Borges’s Seven Saxon Poems in 1974. This volume contained […]

Object of the Week: The Milton Hebald Bust

The first object is the bust of Anthony Burgess by the American artist Milton Hebald (1917-2015). This bust appeared on the front cover of both volumes of Burgess’s biography, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You’ve Had Your Time (1990). It was made in 1970, when Burgess and his second wife Liana had recently […]

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