The re-release of the Clockwork Orange film in the United Kingdom (on 5 April 2019) provides an opportunity to revisit the turbulent history of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation, which was first shown in New York in December 1971, with the British and European premieres taking place in January 1972. To many people in Britain, Kubrick’s […]

1. A Clockwork Orange was not the original title of the novel. In Anthony Burgess’s diary for 1958, he begins a plan for the novel that would eventually become A Clockwork Orange. It appears he originally intended the novel to be titled The Plank in Your Eye, an allusion to Matthew’s Gospel. During the Sermon […]

I went to see Anthony Burgess in the aftermath of A Clockwork Orange. I can’t remember exactly when: but I have the impression that the movie had come out, had incited vociferous opposition, and Burgess was anxious to ‘put things right.’ He was staying in Grosvenor House hotel – or, maybe, the Dorchester: anyhow one […]