The Black Prince is a novel by Adam Roberts, adapted from an original script by Anthony Burgess and published by Unbound in 2018. Matthew Asprey Gear takes a closer look. The 1960s was a fine decade for films on the Plantagenets and Tudors, from Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968) to A Man […]
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lectures, PhD student Sam Jermy casts a light on Burgess’s fascination with the boorish knight Falstaff — including the unpublished Sir John Falstaff va alla Guerra.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 was fascinated by the life and work of Sigmund Freud. As a writer and composer, he often returned to the founder of modern psychoanalysis in his creative works. The list begins with his stage adaptation of Oedipus the King in 1972 (a consciously Freudian work). This was accompanied by the novel MF, which […]
Born in 1917, Anthony Burgess would have celebrated his 103rd birthday on 25 February 2020. But what did he think the twenty-first century would be like? It is possible to offer an answer to this question, thanks to a newly-discovered document from the archive. Back in the mists of 1984, the year when Anthony Burgess […]
From 1963 to 1968 Anthony Burgess was an occasional television critic for the Listener. The majority of his published reviews were of documentaries, but towards the end of his tenure he also reviewed some television drama, including The Prisoner, the classic series which blends the tropes of James Bond secret agents with those of science fiction. […]
The third volume of the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess is his ‘lost’ science fiction novel. Puma, written by Burgess in 1976, but only published as part of his 1982 novel The End of the World News, is an apocalyptic story about a stray planet on a collision-course with Earth. This is […]
This copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune dates from 1966, when Anthony Burgess reviewed it for the Observer. He was impressed by the scope of the book and by the calibre of Herbert’s literary creation. The review displays a wide knowledge of science-fiction conventions. Dune is set on Arrakis, a desert planet on which humans mine […]
‘Religion is the oppressor. True, it has given us art, music, architecture of unsurpassable beauty, but that does not prevent it from being a roof over the heads of shivering people scared of engaging the huge windy blackness without. Man invented God because he knew no better – the great unpredictable father, indulgent or angry, […]
Burgess’s screenplay of the life of Daniel Schreber. By Anna Edwards.
Screening on 4 November at 6.20pm at Cornerhouse cinema, Manchester.