The Burgess Foundation’s library of books by Anthony Burgess is extremely large. It includes almost every edition of his 33 novels and 25 books of non-fiction ever published in English. It also includes the majority of the foreign editions of his work. As this library of books is so large, rare books often lie hidden […]
When you’re a curious school-child who trips over an enthralling writer on your journey down the shelves in your local library, you don’t dream that he will one day review your first novel. By the age of about 16 I was so repelled by the tweedy self-satisfaction of the fashionable British novelists of the time […]
In the Burgess Foundation library there is a small collection of the religious texts, including several bibles, the Quran, and several histories of world religion. Among these books is a small volume bound in scuffed leather titled Rituale Romanum. This book contains the Rites of the Roman Catholic Church, and is entirely in Latin. Burgess’s […]
It was the best put-down ever. Although Anthony and I corresponded over various linguistic matters, I met him only once, during a conference organized – I think by the British Council – at Bush House in London, and I think it was in the early 1980s. As that sentence illustrates, I’ve forgotten all the relevant […]
Anthony Burgess was not a prolific diarist, but the archive at the Burgess Foundation contains some notebooks with private journal entries and notes towards his writing projects. In most of these notebooks, only the first few pages have been filled with Burgess’s writing, with the remaining pages either blank or full of sketches or hastily […]
The Week-End Book, published by the Nonesuch Press in June 1924, was a staple of British households in the first half of the twentieth century. Its popularity was such that it went through eighteen impressions up to 1927, and between October 1928 and October 1930 it sold more than 52,000 copies. The book itself is […]
Complications started with Liana, his wife, who had given a slightly different date of death for Anthony to the press. Eventually, the two or three days of difference in the date were sorted out by one of the newspapers (it was Toni Howard of the obituary department of the London Times, in fact). Then, she […]
In 1970, Burgess moved with his family from Malta to Italy. They settled in the town of Bracciano, where they bought a fifteenth-century house on the cobbled Piazza Padella. This house would be the centre of Burgess’s creative life until he moved to Monaco in 1975, despite frequent trips to Malta and the United States. […]
This ceramic whisky decanter was produced by Bell’s in 1982 to mark the birth of Prince William, and was part of a series made by the company to commemorate royal occasions. Now considered desirable collector’s items, these decanters contained some of Bell’s finest whisky blends. The sticker on the box indicates that it was purchased […]
Anthony Burgess often collaborated with visual artists, such as Joe Tilson (for the art book, Will and Testament) and Fulvio Testa, who illustrated two books for children, A Long Trip to Teatime and The Land Where the Ice Cream Grows. Another collaboration took place in 1991, when he was invited by Stephen Spender and David […]