Obscenity & the Arts began in an oblong room, the engine-house of a former mill, situated within an area once dubbed ‘Little Ireland’, surrounded as we were, by Anthony Burgess’s furniture. Indelible images of twentieth century criminality blazed large on a screen at the very end of the room. An articulate and astute Mark Blacklock […]

The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, published in hardback by Manchester University Press, is a new series which aims to bring all of Burgess’s novels and non-fiction books back into print. Each volume contains an editor’s introduction, a newly edited text, extensive notes and annotations, plus previously unpublished materials drawn from the […]

The third volume of the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess is his ‘lost’ science fiction novel. Puma, written by Burgess in 1976, but only published as part of his 1982 novel The End of the World News, is an apocalyptic story about a stray planet on a collision-course with Earth. This is […]

Anthony Burgess claimed that he encountered ‘forbidden’ literature for the first time when he read Ulysses by James Joyce. Nevertheless, his recollections of his first reading are not entirely consistent. In Little Wilson and Big God, he claims that one of the teachers at his school ‘had brought [Ulysses] back from illiberal Nazi Germany in the […]

Although A Clockwork Orange is the most controversial of Anthony Burgess’s novels, with its themes of ultraviolence and state control, the book was ignored by the censors in most countries (not including Malta). But another Burgess novel, The Worm and the Ring, was suppressed not on the grounds of obscenity, but because it fell foul […]

‘The history of England, from the time of the Roman occupation until twenty years ago, has been about the insistence of a very insular people on cutting itself off from that huge and dangerous continent that lies to its east and is separated by a mere twenty miles of sea’ (Anthony Burgess, ‘England in Europe’, […]

Applications invited from researchers.

A few months after Anthony Burgess had moved to Malta in November 1968, his personal library was inspected by officials of the Postmaster General’s Office in Valletta. Malta’s strict laws against the vilification of religion, obscenity and immorality meant that a number of Burgess’s books were confiscated and destroyed. The official documents relating to the […]

Sir Vidia Naipaul, who has died at the age of 85, was one of the foremost English-language writers of the late twentieth century. A novelist, memoirist and travel writer, he scoured the globe in search of resonant stories, which he told in a variety of different narrative forms. Born into an Indian family at Chaguanas […]

We are very sad to learn that the writer Geoffrey Aggeler has died in Santa Barbara at the age of 78. Professor Aggeler was a central figure in the first generation of Burgess scholarship. He was the author of Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (1979) and editor of Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess (1986). […]