Here is some more from a newly-discovered recording of Anthony Burgess reading from the first section of his autobiography. In this extract, he talks about his Lancashire accent, and how he lost or rather trained himself to override it when he left what he calls the ‘native province’. Burgess is not ashamed of his roots – as he insists later in the text, ‘I am proud to be a Mancunian’ – but conformity to the ‘national language of the educated’, or the accent of the south-east, was for him, as for many from the north before the war, ‘an economic and social necessity’.

This passage is especially interesting as Burgess recites a short passage of doggerel verse using two accents: the received pronunciation of his later years, and the Lancastrian of his youth.

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