In which our author hunts for the Moonstone and rewrites Sherlock Holmes. Although Anthony Burgess is often thought of as an upmarket literary writer, he was deeply engaged throughout his writing life with popular forms of writing. Beyond his involvement in writing historical fiction, science fiction, and Cold War spy novels, he had a serious […]

This essay was written in 1983, when Burgess’s verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi in the leading role. The production was a great success: Michael Billington, the long-standing theatre critic of the Guardian, wrote about the ‘bold, emotionally unashamed’ […]