A third series of extracts from Dominic Sandbrook’s lecture on A Clockwork Orange and its 1960s and 1970s contexts. Click the players to listen.

In this first segment he discusses some of Anthony Burgess’s responses to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, and in particular Burgess’s resentment at being required to defend it in the media: ‘Kubrick’s achievement swallowed mine whole, and yet I was responsible for its malign influence on the young.’

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Here is a discussion of the Thamesmead housing estate in East London that provided Kubrick with many of the locations for his film, and which is ‘a monument to the lofty ideals and shabby reality’ of post-war Britain.

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And here is a wider discussion of how the political and cultural climate had changed in the period between Burgess’s novel and Kubrick’s film, with particular focus on the role of the BBFC and the behaviour of the tabloid press.

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More about A Clockwork Orange can be found around this website, and also at our exhibition ‘Fifty Years Of A Clockwork Orange’ which runs until 27 January 2013 at the John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester (open daily, free entry).

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