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 […]
Our Inside The Archive blog series casts new light onto the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we take a leaf from Anthony Burgess’s notebooks. Fourteen of Anthony Burgess’s diaries and notebooks survive in the collections at the Burgess Foundation, containing fragmentary but intriguing manuscript material dating from 1940 to 1977. Burgess was not an […]
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 […]
One of the most fascinating, yet underexplored, areas of the Burgess Foundation’s archive is its object collection. The collection consists of furniture, musical instruments, typewriters, crockery, glassware, awards, artwork, ornaments, and other collectibles that belonged to Burgess and his family and were gathered throughout their travels in Europe, Malaysia, and America. Many individual pieces are […]
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 […]
You may have seen his piano, but Anthony Burgess owned many more instruments. This trip into the Burgess archive’s musical instrument collection reveals all. Regular visitors to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester will be familiar with three of the more substantial pieces in our musical instrument collection, which are on permanent display: a […]