In this birthday blog post, we consider some of the anniversaries celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his literature and music. 25 February is the 107th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s birth in Harpurhey, north Manchester. His original name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson. As he writes in Little Wilson and Big God, the first volume of […]
In 1948 Anthony Burgess began a teaching job as a lecturer in speech and drama at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College, near Preston in Lancashire. He trained teachers as part of the post-war project to turn ex-servicemen into schoolmasters, and they were given an intensive one-year course: Burgess gave courses in the history of drama […]
When Jorge Luis Borges met Anthony Burgess for the first time, Borges was 77 years old and at the height of his international fame. He had been blind for 23 years. Burgess had just turned sixty, and was much in demand as a screenwriter and public speaker. The venue for their historic meeting was the […]
In 2020, the Burgess Foundation was on the point of launching a new archive volunteer programme. The closure of our building due to the pandemic meant that we had to suspend all on-site activities. We explored options for working remotely with volunteers and, by October, we were ready to begin a remote transcription project with […]
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 plot of Earthly Powers is built around Carlo Campanati, a Catholic priest whose impious attitude to life does not prevent him from […]
As he approaches the end of his research into Anthony Burgess’s 1973 Shakespeare lectures, PhD student Sam Jermy casts a light on Burgess’s fascination with the boorish knight Falstaff — including the unpublished Sir John Falstaff va alla Guerra. In his lecture course ‘William Shakespeare: The Man and His Work’ delivered at City College New […]
The sound archives at the Burgess Foundation contain thousands of hours of recordings, including Burgess playing music, practicing lectures, reading from his own works, and speaking in public. This audio extract is from a series of lectures Burgess gave at City College in New York about Shakespeare and his peers. This recording was made on […]