One of the key episodes in Earthly Powers is the trial scene in chapter 64, where Kenneth Toomey stands up in a London magistrate’s court to defend a fellow writer who has been accused of publishing a blasphemous poem. In the course of giving evidence, Toomey makes a public declaration of his homosexuality, which he […]

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 […]

Anthony Burgess enjoyed comparing himself to other novelists, poets and playwrights. He sometimes spoke of himself as belonging to a group of writers who had emerged from provincial cities and had, through talent and persistence, made their mark on the British literary establishment. In his biography of Shakespeare, for example, Burgess suggests that, like Shakespeare, […]

Obscenity & the Arts began in an oblong room, the engine-house of a former mill, situated within an area once dubbed ‘Little Ireland’, surrounded as we were, by Anthony Burgess’s furniture. Indelible images of twentieth century criminality blazed large on a screen at the very end of the room. An articulate and astute Mark Blacklock […]

Anthony Burgess claimed that he encountered ‘forbidden’ literature for the first time when he read Ulysses by James Joyce. Nevertheless, his recollections of his first reading are not entirely consistent. In Little Wilson and Big God, he claims that one of the teachers at his school ‘had brought [Ulysses] back from illiberal Nazi Germany in the […]

Although A Clockwork Orange is the most controversial of Anthony Burgess’s novels, with its themes of ultraviolence and state control, the book was ignored by the censors in most countries (not including Malta). But another Burgess novel, The Worm and the Ring, was suppressed not on the grounds of obscenity, but because it fell foul […]

A few months after Anthony Burgess had moved to Malta in November 1968, his personal library was inspected by officials of the Postmaster General’s Office in Valletta. Malta’s strict laws against the vilification of religion, obscenity and immorality meant that a number of Burgess’s books were confiscated and destroyed. The official documents relating to the […]

When the novel Lolita appeared in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov was a little known Russian novelist who had emigrated to the United States. After Olympia Press published the novel in Paris, Nabokov quickly became famous, not for his virtuosic control over language but for the scandal his novel had provoked. Olympia Press was generally regarded as […]

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 […]

The discovery of a previously unknown text by Burgess about his favourite novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses.