The Burgess Foundation is not the only archive dedicated to the work of Anthony Burgess. We cast our eye further afield to Burgess collections elsewhere. Harry Ransom Center card catalog (pic: University of Texas at Austin) Given Anthony Burgess’s peripatetic existence and his international appeal, it is perhaps no surprise that the Burgess Foundation’s collection […]
Of the hundreds of objects belonging to Burgess in the Foundation’s archive, there are some which, more or less without fail, are guaranteed to evoke an immediate response from visitors — none more so than Anthony Burgess’s typewriters, some of which are on display in the reading room. Burgess had a particularly close association with […]
Perfect? Masterly? Sub-literary and contrived? We look at Anthony Burgess’s love-hate relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2020 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and eighty years since his death in 1940 at the age of 44. He is among the authors who Burgess found […]
Not every project realises its full potential, and documents in the Burgess archive point towards a film project which, like its subject, faced a premature end. In December 1968, Burgess received a letter from his literary agent Deborah Rogers, with an update on incoming correspondence. Burgess had left England in October to begin a new life […]
The Inside The Archive blog series describes highlights of the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we look at Anthony Burgess’s notebooks. There are fourteen diaries and notebooks by Anthony Burgess in the Foundation’s archive, containing fragments of manuscript material written between 1940 and 1977. Burgess was not a prolific diarist, and his attempts to […]
When Anthony Burgess moved to Malaya, he needed to learn the language. Take a look at the books that helped his studies, and find out how we’re preserving those books. On 5 August 1954, Burgess set sail from Southampton with his first wife, Lynne, and their cat, Lalage, ready to begin a new life as […]
One of the most fascinating, yet underexplored, areas of the Burgess Foundation’s archive is its object collection. The collection consists of furniture, musical instruments, typewriters, crockery, glassware, awards, artwork, ornaments, and other collectibles that belonged to Burgess and his family and were gathered throughout their travels in Europe, Malaysia, and America. Many individual pieces are […]
The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD student Sam Jermy writes about his work on Burgess and Shakespeare, and his new research project with the Foundation. Anthony Burgess was continually interested and engaged with the writing, world and life of William Shakespeare. This creative engagement was sustained throughout […]
You may have seen his piano, but Anthony Burgess owned many more instruments. This trip into the Burgess archive’s musical instrument collection reveals all. Regular visitors to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester will be familiar with three of the more substantial pieces in our musical instrument collection, which are on permanent display: a […]
We take a closer look – and listen – to Anthony Burgess record collection held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation The vinyl collection at the Burgess Foundation contains a huge variety of records all owned and collected by Anthony Burgess and his family. This important resource tells us much about Burgess’s listening habits, and […]