Burgess and the Atomic Age: Tremor of Intent

In 1965, the year before Burgess published his spy novel, Tremor of Intent, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels sold more than 15 million paperback copies in the UK alone. Given the vast enthusiasm for espionage fiction on the part of the book-buying public, it’s understandable that Burgess was keen to cash in on this publishing […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Extracts from Anthony Burgess’s Sonata in H

The actor Paul Barnhill reads extracts from ‘Sonata in H’, a reflection on the atomic age, written by Anthony Burgess while he was living in Adderbury, Oxfordshire, in the 1950s. The complete text of this long poem will be published by Incline Press in 2021. The video was recorded in July 2020 at the International […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Honey for the Bears and the Cold War

Near the beginning of Honey for the Bears, Anthony Burgess’s 1963 novel set in Leningrad, there is a reference to the Cambridge spies: Not everything you do has to be political. Like those diplomats that went over that time. For all anybody knows they might have gone over because of their stomachs. In Russia, nobody […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: The Monster We’ve Learned to Live With

Anthony Burgess published this essay to mark the fortieth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima in August 1985. It is reprinted here as part of our online series ‘Burgess and the Atomic Age’, which includes poetry, performance and new articles. The Emperor Hirohito accepted the Allied terms on 14 August 1945, and Japan’s formal surrender […]

Burgess and the Atomic Age: Sonata in H

When the atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, more than 140,000 people lost their lives, either in the blast itself or as a result of radiation sickness afterwards. This catastrophic event inaugurated a new era in world history and politics. From 1945 onwards, everyone would be living in the shadow […]