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 […]
Anthony (John to us) was my tutor of Language and Literature at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College for Teachers, near Preston, in its final year ending in May 1950. I worked closely with him as actor, stage manager, and producer in many college Dramatic productions, and acted as Methusela in his production of Nigel Balchin’s […]
VHS cassettes became popular in the last decade of Anthony Burgess’s life, and the small collection of films on video cassettes in the Burgess Foundation archive shows that he embraced the new technology and watched many films from the comfort of his own living room. Burgess was an avid film viewer throughout his life, first […]
When you exhume a Sicilian who has been in the grave for 2000 years, he’ll tell you vaffanculo and then he’ll rather self-pityingly say: ‘Why did you wake me? I haven’t finished plotting my revenge yet.’ I rather think if we dug up Anthony Burgess, we would get something similar. He was colour blind, which […]
Throughout his career, Burgess enjoyed close relationships with other writers. Even before his first book had been published, he would associate with literary figures. In the early 1940s, while on leave from his Second World War posting to Gibraltar, he frequented the pubs of ‘Fitzrovia’, the area around Fitzroy Square in London. Pubs such as […]
He wasn’t exactly what we expected. No, my brothers. He was not like Alex, nor even like one of his three droogs. ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,’ he began reading to us. Flashbulbs popped. The New York Times. […]
From 1976, Anthony Burgess lived in a top-floor apartment on rue Grimaldi in Monaco. In 1988, there was an ingress of water from the roof of the building, which partly destroyed Burgess’s collection of manuscripts. According to a letter in the Burgess Foundation’s archive, the papers were being stored in a spare bathroom. Shortly after […]