I met Anthony in the French House in the Summer of 1983. For those who don’t know it, the pub at 49 Dean Street in Soho is unlike any other. For years it still sported its original inn sign of the ‘York Minster’. But everyone called it by what it had been known as for […]

Anthony Burgess was wonderful, extraordinary, kind of a good-looking guy, you know, tall, straight, chain smoker of these little cigarillos. He’s a great man now and everyone takes him seriously, but he was a lot of fun and especially with the wives we had a lot of good times. He talked about music a lot […]

The most telling memorial to Anthony Burgess would have been to leave a big white gap on the pages of the Observer or the Independent or whatever – the space his words would have filled. His death must supply work for a good handful of aspiring literary journalists, job opportunities galore. And that’s just in […]

I knew Anthony Burgess best during an intense seminar in Monte Carlo. In 1990, at the height of the Gabler-Kidd-Stephen Joyce controversy over the new Gabler text, Burgess had decided views which evolved and changed during the course of the deliberations. I was instrumental in bringing out that change and in recording his intelligent and […]

For me the beginning and the end of Burgess’s opus are represented by The Malayan Trilogy and Earthly Powers. Last things were one of his first and enduring concerns, though he never stinted on what went before. His first three novels, which comprise The Malayan Trilogy, are a hot, spicy curry; the ingredients include realism, […]

In 1983 I was a member of the committee that organised the Meet the Author strand of the first Edinburgh Book Festival. How we succeeded in attracting Anthony Burgess I cannot remember. I suspect our secretary, Janis Adams, simply wrote him a letter of invitation and he signalled his willingness to attend. He had been […]

Monday 19 October 1992 Start the Week, on a cold Monday morning. This morning I have two massive egos to lock horns with — Anthony Burgess and Broadway director Hal Prince. We’re to be given 15 minutes each and the thought of Burgess and Prince having to stop what they’re doing and listen to me […]

Burgess was a titan of literature and I believe that his divers canon of work will one day be recognised for what it is – the unique outpourings of an erudite and catholic writer who annoyed the literary mafia by the sheer fecundity of his mind. They could not slot him into a particular pigeon […]

Anthony Burgess was everything Iris Murdoch wasn’t, far away from the twitterings of yesterday’s Senior Common Room and the British literary establishment. Northern, Catholic, something of an outsider, he wasn’t just a linguistic virtuoso but an anti-Puritan, the most humane of curmudgeons, and a reactionary of vision. A Clockwork Orange seems so mutated out of […]

I first began reading Burgess in my teens, in the late 70s, picking up paperbacks of The Doctor is Sick and Honey for the Bears and then became mildly obsessed with him over the next ten years or so. I collected as many of his books as I could and even kept a scrapbook of […]