Philip Larkin, who was born 100 years ago, was a twentieth-century novelist, poet and music critic whose place among the immortals remains uncertain. Although Larkin’s writing was popular during his lifetime, his reputation was badly damaged by the revelation, in a posthumous edition of his letters, that he was an enthusiastic racist and misogynist. His […]
John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger inspired the term ‘angry young men’ to describe a group of writers whose uncompromising and accessible works reflected a disillusionment with British society in the post-war period. Their world was run-down and meagre, and its protagonists were trapped in unfulfilled lives, resenting authority figures whose pretentiousness was […]
One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library. His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting […]
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lectures, PhD student Sam Jermy casts a light on Burgess’s fascination with the boorish knight Falstaff — including the unpublished Sir John Falstaff va alla Guerra.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 […]
Perfect? Masterly? Sub-literary and contrived? We look at Anthony Burgess’s love-hate relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2020 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and eighty years since his death in 1940 at the age of 44. He is among the authors who Burgess found […]
The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD student Sam Jermy writes about his work on Burgess and Shakespeare, and his new research project with the Foundation. Anthony Burgess was continually interested and engaged with the writing, world and life of William Shakespeare. This creative engagement was sustained throughout […]