Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Poetry is present in Earthly Powers from the earliest scenes in the narrative. Kenneth Toomey, enjoying his retirement in his grand Maltese palazzo, […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. As the typescript of Earthly Powers approached the end of its decade-long gestation in 1979, there was a significant hole in the book. […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Anthony Burgess lived and worked in the Federation of Malaya between 1954 and 1957. He was a witness to the brutal civil war […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. In one of the most memorable scenes in Earthly Powers, Philip Shawcross, a British man in Malaya, apparently possessed by demons, undergoes an […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Throughout his writing career Anthony Burgess was inspired by the conflict between the teachings of Saint Augustine and the British monk Pelagius. Augustine, […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The plot of Earthly Powers is built around Carlo Campanati, a Catholic priest whose impious attitude to life does not prevent him from […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. In his article ‘Why I Wrote Earthly Powers’, Anthony Burgess explains that the original title of the novel was The Prince of the […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The novel which exerted the strongest influence on Anthony Burgess’s literary work is undoubtedly Ulysses by James Joyce, which he first read as […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Anthony Burgess described the protagonist of Earthly Powers as ‘an aging homosexual writer based on William Somerset Maugham’. The source of this inspiration […]

Earthly Powers is a book that is made up of other books. The story of Kenneth M. Toomey is directly inspired by Anthony Burgess’s immense knowledge of literature and the literary world. These inspirations vary from the biographies of authors and other celebrated figures to interpretive readings of other books. Burgess uses both fiction and […]