We look at the shorter pieces for piano written by Anthony Burgess, including the rather lively ‘Hornpipe’ Anthony Burgess’s ‘Hornpipe’ is an undated short piece for solo piano. Possibly part of an untitled set of six keyboard works, including three fugues, an air, and a passacaglia, its lively and simple melody is based on a […]
We reveal a gruesome inspiration behind Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers: the Jonestown suicide cult leader Jim Jones. One of the pivotal events in Earthly Powers is the establishment and violent dissolution of Godfrey Manning’s religious cult, known as the ‘Children of God’. Although this cult seems to be well ingrained in the narrative of […]
The Observer / Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is now open for entries. Our annual review writing competition has a prize fund of £4,000 and an opportunity to be published in the Observer newspaper. Anthony Burgess wrote hundreds of articles for many publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator and the Yorkshire Post, which […]
You are invited to join the Earthly Powers Reading Group Earthly Powers is Anthony Burgess’s longest and most ambitious novel. This epic saga, which takes in two world wars and some of the darkest moments in twentieth-century history, is regarded by many as Burgess’s masterpiece. Throughout 2020, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is celebrating the […]
The Inside The Archive blog series describes highlights of the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we look at Anthony Burgess’s notebooks. There are fourteen diaries and notebooks by Anthony Burgess in the Foundation’s archive, containing fragments of manuscript material written between 1940 and 1977. Burgess was not a prolific diarist, and his attempts to […]
Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers is full of literary figures, with perhaps the most notable cameo being James Joyce. On Bloomsday, we examine this most famous novelist inside a novel. Earthly Powers is full of fictional representations of writers. The protagonist Kenneth Toomey takes up with invented poets (Val Wrigley, Roger Pembroke), discovers the novels of […]
10 June 2020 is the fiftieth anniversary of Burgess’s famous lecture, ‘Obscenity and the Arts’, which was delivered to a large audience at the University of Malta in Valletta. In this blog, we look back on the story of Burgess’s lecture and the events which provoked it. In November 1968, Burgess and his new […]
When Anthony Burgess moved to Malaya, he needed to learn the language. Take a look at the books that helped his studies, and find out how we’re preserving those books. On 5 August 1954, Burgess set sail from Southampton with his first wife, Lynne, and their cat, Lalage, ready to begin a new life as […]
As we continue to explore our collections with our Inside The Archive blog series, we load up the video player to watch Anthony Burgess on film. Anthony Burgess was one of the first novelists to embrace the medium of television and appeared on the small screen many times throughout his career. As well as becoming […]
Breaking news: As part of our ongoing ‘Inside the Archive’ series, we dig into Anthony Burgess’s journalistic career — and his attitude towards it. The journalism collection at the Burgess Foundation contains more than three thousand reviews and essays. There are pieces by Anthony Burgess from the very beginnings of his writing career to the […]