2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]

Clockwork Controversy: Myth: Anthony Burgess hated Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange. Fact: Anthony Burgess thought the film was a masterpiece and that Kubrick was a great filmmaker. But Burgess resented having to defend the film on television and in print as it was not his own work. Anthony Burgess had seen Stanley […]

The second in our series of Dystopian Dialogues is a conversation with Nathan Waddell from the University of Birmingham about George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and dystopia. Burgess was strongly influenced by Orwell, and in his book 1985 he places Nineteen Eighty-Four in the context of a ravaged post-war Britain. He writes: ‘You saw the effects […]

John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger inspired the term ‘angry young men’ to describe a group of writers whose uncompromising and accessible works reflected a disillusionment with British society in the post-war period. Their world was run-down and meagre, and its protagonists were trapped in unfulfilled lives, resenting authority figures whose pretentiousness was […]

The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD researcher Milena Schwab-Graham writes about her work on the extensive Anthony Burgess cassette tape collection. In This Man and Music (1982), Anthony Burgess’s collection of essays exploring the interconnections between music and literature, he calls himself a ‘faker, a patcher, something […]

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]

Clockwork Controversy: Myth: Andy Warhol bought the film rights to A Clockwork Orange from Anthony Burgess. Fact: Andy Warhol did make a version of A Clockwork Orange, which was called Vinyl – but this was a pirate film. It was made on a shoestring budget at the Factory in 1965. A Clockwork Orange received mixed […]

In the second part of our podcast exploration of A Clockwork Orange’s life on the stage (listen to the previous podcast episode here), Will Carr from the Burgess Foundation speaks to director Alexandra Spencer-Jones and actor Martin McCreadie, the creative forces behind Action to the Word’s powerful version of Burgess’s story. This innovative all-male production […]

The first French stage production of A Clockwork Orange took place at the Théâtre de la Ménagerie at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris in 2006. Yves Buelens, one of the Trustees of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, was in the audience: here is his review. The Théâtre de la Ménagerie stage production of A Clockwork Orange […]

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]