Anthony Burgess wrote this essay for the New York Times in 1970, the year in which his Shakespeare biography was published. After completing a lecture tour of Europe and the United States, he was teaching at Princeton University. I’ve spent the last couple of years, off and on, in two worlds simultaneously — imaginatively in […]

In this birthday blog post, we consider some of the anniversaries celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his literature and music. 25 February is the 107th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s birth in Harpurhey, north Manchester. His original name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson. As he writes in Little Wilson and Big God, the first volume of […]

Anthony Burgess died in London on 22 November 1993. He was 76 years old and had been diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year previously. The final phase of his life was characterised by intense creative production, in a variety of forms. The publication of a long novel about the rediscovery of the sword […]

There seems to be a widespread assumption, often repeated on social media, that Anthony Burgess was a political conservative whose novels promote a right-wing agenda. Although Burgess sometimes claimed to take no interest in party politics, his position turns out to be a more complicated one than expected. Looking into his novels, autobiographical works and […]

Here at the Burgess Foundation, we are immersed in the world of Anthony Burgess. We revel in finding out small details about his life and career, we scour the archive for previously unknown facts and we have dedicated ourselves to bringing previously unpublished writing into print. We sometimes forget that, because of the sheer number […]

Anthony Burgess is well known as a writer from Manchester who lived in places such as Malaya and Monaco, but the period of his residence in London is less well documented. This article looks at the books and other writing projects he worked on during the five years he lived at 24 Glebe Street in […]

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. The novel which exerted the strongest influence on Anthony Burgess’s literary work is undoubtedly Ulysses by James Joyce, which he first read as […]

As he approaches the end of his research into Anthony Burgess’s 1973 Shakespeare lectures, PhD student Sam Jermy casts a light on Burgess’s fascination with the boorish knight Falstaff — including the unpublished Sir John Falstaff va alla Guerra. In his lecture course ‘William Shakespeare: The Man and His Work’ delivered at City College New […]

Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare was published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape as a lavishly illustrated folio-sized volume. Burgess described his biography as a way of using up the research he had undertaken for a film about Shakespeare’s life that he’d written for Warner Brothers, commissioned in 1968 and cancelled three years later. The UK hardback edition […]