Here is Burgess reading ‘Annus Mirabilis’ by Philip Larkin, a poem that Burgess included in his anthology They Wrote In English. Burgess and Larkin were contemporaries, but do not seem to have known each other. Burgess appears in a letter from Larkin to Anthony Thwaite in 1966:

‘The whole of English Lit. at the moment is being written by Anthony Burgess. He reviews all new books except those by himself, and these latter include such jeux d’esprit as ‘A Shorter Finnegan’s Wake’ and so on … He must be a kind of Batman of contemporary letters.’

Larkin goes on to say of Burgess that ‘I suspect a Mediterranean background’, though what he means by this racial slur is not made clear.

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Will Carr

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