Anthony Burgess published this essay to mark the fortieth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima in August 1985. It is reprinted here as part of our online series ‘Burgess and the Atomic Age’, which includes poetry, performance and new articles. The Emperor Hirohito accepted the Allied terms on 14 August 1945, and Japan’s formal surrender […]
When the atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, more than 140,000 people lost their lives, either in the blast itself or as a result of radiation sickness afterwards. This catastrophic event inaugurated a new era in world history and politics. From 1945 onwards, everyone would be living in the shadow […]
The Burgess Foundation’s collection of Anthony Burgess’s private library contains over 8000 volumes, many of which have come to us from Burgess’s houses around the world. Travels in Malaya, Malta, Italy and elsewhere, as well as the ravages of time, have unfortunately damaged some of the books: termites, floods, heat, sunlight and vigorous reading have […]
In April 1970, Lawrence Durrell came to Princeton to read. I talked with him at dinner and found him a midget with a monumental ego – his brother got him right in My Family and Other Animals. He thought the greatest benefit from a public-school education was the ability to stay calm and collected amid […]
The Anthony Burgess Foundation is pleased to announce a new collaboration with Incline Press, one of Britain’s best-loved letterpress printers. Under the title ‘Occasional Essays and Poems of Anthony Burgess’, this series of letterpress printed books will present a selection of rare Burgess works in handsome limited-edition volumes. Our previous collaboration with Incline Press was […]
From 1976, Anthony Burgess lived in a top-floor apartment on rue Grimaldi in Monaco. In 1988, there was an ingress of water from the roof of the building, which partly destroyed Burgess’s collection of manuscripts. According to a letter in the Burgess Foundation’s archive, the papers were being stored in a spare bathroom. Shortly after […]
The second in a series of new articles from our Cultural Engagement Fellow, Martin Kratz.
A seedy flat and literary revenge. By Andrew Biswell.