Anthony Burgess was everything Iris Murdoch wasn’t, far away from the twitterings of yesterday’s Senior Common Room and the British literary establishment. Northern, Catholic, something of an outsider, he wasn’t just a linguistic virtuoso but an anti-Puritan, the most humane of curmudgeons, and a reactionary of vision. A Clockwork Orange seems so mutated out of […]
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 […]
I first began reading Burgess in my teens, in the late 70s, picking up paperbacks of The Doctor is Sick and Honey for the Bears and then became mildly obsessed with him over the next ten years or so. I collected as many of his books as I could and even kept a scrapbook of […]
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 […]
When I became Assistant Editor (Features) of The [London] Times in 1981, I was delighted to inherit Anthony Burgess as a weekly columnist. We never knew what would be coming next from Monte Carlo; he was the only Times columnist who was immune to any staff briefing, even a telephone chat over the issues of […]
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. […]
Anthony Burgess is a brilliant English novelist. I remember feeling greatly pleased on reading a review he did for the Observer on my fourth novel, The Secret Ladder from the Guyana Quartet. This happened some time before we met. I mention this now as a token of the generous, unobtrusive approach he made to […]
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 […]
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the Manchester International Festival announce the world premiere of a new song cycle for baritone and orchestra by the composer Raymond Yiu, The World Was Once All Miracle. Commissioned by the Burgess Foundation as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Anthony Burgess in 2017, the new piece […]
We are delighted to continue our collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra as they play Symphony in C (1975) by Anthony Burgess on 4 July 2017 at the Bridgewater Hall as part of the Manchester International Festival. This special performance celebrating Burgess’s centenary will be the European premiere. Anthony Burgess claimed to have written three […]