To mark the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, we present a weekly online series Anthony Burgess at the Movies in which we zoom in on Anthony Burgess’s interest in cinema. What Burgess says: ‘Jean Cocteau was a fine film-maker, and this handling of a classical […]
Anthony Burgess is well known as a writer from Manchester who lived in places such as Malaya and Monaco, but the period of his residence in London is less well documented. This article looks at the books and other writing projects he worked on during the five years he lived at 24 Glebe Street in […]
Nicholas Rankin is a writer and broadcaster who first discovered the work of Anthony Burgess when he was a student in the late 1960s. Burgess would go on to inform Rankin’s later writing, and he appears in his recent history of wartime Gibraltar, Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler. Nicholas has agreed to take […]
Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Throughout his writing career Anthony Burgess was inspired by the conflict between the teachings of Saint Augustine and the British monk Pelagius. Augustine, […]
Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The novel which exerted the strongest influence on Anthony Burgess’s literary work is undoubtedly Ulysses by James Joyce, which he first read as […]
Anthony Burgess: Everyone’s Free … Except Me: One Man’s View from the Barrack Room An edited version of this article was published in the Daily Mail on 8 May 1985 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of VE Day. The complete text, reproduced here, appears in the Irwell Edition of A Vision of Battlements (Manchester University Press, […]
John Anthony Burgess Wilson was a genius when it came to inventing himself. Born into a working-class family in Manchester, he educated himself by reading widely, taught himself how to compose music, and got himself into university. He served in the British Army during the Second World War, and afterwards became a school teacher in […]
Edward Pagram (1927-2007) illustrated two of Burgess’s novels: The Eve of St Venus (1964) and A Vision of Battlements (1965). The charcoal illustrations, some of which are included here, show the humorous side to Burgess’s novels, but Burgess had his doubts about them. ‘This turned out not to be a good idea,’ he writes, ‘the […]
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 […]