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). […]

In the final months of 1985, to mark the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth, Burgess wrote the Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard, a modern tribute to Bach’s esteemed and influential Well-Tempered Clavier. Both compositions consist of 24 preludes and fugues, one for every major and minor key. Burgess stands in a long tradition of composing music in […]

When the novel Lolita appeared in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov was a little known Russian novelist who had emigrated to the United States. After Olympia Press published the novel in Paris, Nabokov quickly became famous, not for his virtuosic control over language but for the scandal his novel had provoked. Olympia Press was generally regarded as […]

A year before Anthony Burgess moved to Malta in 1968, he became involved in a controversy about the banning of books closer to home. On the question of whether or not books should be suppressed because they might incite people to commit crimes, he robustly came down on the side of free expression. The Moors […]

Aged 18, I spent a month in the village of Deià on the island of Majorca in the summer of 1969 where an American professor of English, Bob de Maria, from Dowling College, Long Island, founded and ran the Mediterranean Institute. Burgess was one of the guest writers, as was Colin Wilson, who, at the […]

In 1968, Anthony Burgess sold his properties in Chiswick and Etchingham and moved to Malta. The journey to his new home was undertaken by road, in a Bedford Dormobile driven by his new wife, Liana. As they drove south across Europe, Burgess sat in the back of the motor-caravan with his typewriter. Later he wrote: […]

Our new exhibition reconstructs the collection of ‘indecent’ books owned by Anthony Burgess and destroyed by the Maltese government. In October 1968 Anthony Burgess married his second wife, Liana Macellari, and they decided to leave England for good. They bought an eighteenth-century palazzo in Malta and decided to begin a new life there. They packed […]

As well as being a prolific novelist, Anthony Burgess had a ceaseless energy for writing journalism. Because of a faulty diagnosis of a fatal brain tumour in 1959, Burgess was determined to make a living from writing, and it was clear that being a novelist alone was not the way to do this. Writing in […]