When Jorge Luis Borges met Anthony Burgess for the first time, Borges was 77 years old and at the height of his international fame. He had been blind for 23 years. Burgess had just turned sixty, and was much in demand as a screenwriter and public speaker. The venue for their historic meeting was the […]

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 […]

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 […]