Throughout 2020, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Earthly Powers, Burgess’s longest and most accomplished novel. We have already launched a dedicated Earthly Powers micro-site and are looking forward to future meetings of the Earthly Powers reading group. We invite you to listen to our series of podcasts themed around Earthly Powers, in which […]
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, […]
In this edition of the podcast, Andrew Biswell and Graham Foster discuss Burgess’s experience of Rome, from his two novels Beard’s Roman Women and ABBA ABBA, to his engagement with Italian culture and the circle of artists and writers he associated with during his time living in the Eternal City.
ABBA ABBA is one of Anthony Burgess’s most inventive works, blending historical fiction, poetry and translation into a novel which celebrates John Keats and the sonnet form. Set in Rome during the winter of 1820-21, the first part of ABBA ABBA recounts Keats’s final weeks and his eventual death from tuberculosis in a house on […]
‘The history of England, from the time of the Roman occupation until twenty years ago, has been about the insistence of a very insular people on cutting itself off from that huge and dangerous continent that lies to its east and is separated by a mere twenty miles of sea’ (Anthony Burgess, ‘England in Europe’, […]
Anthony Burgess’s copy of Italian Food by Elizabeth David is battered, ripped and stained, suggesting heavy use. It also contains scraps of paper which mark certain recipes, giving an insight into what Burgess may have been cooking. Burgess’s edition of Italian Food was published by Penguin in 1967, and there is internal evidence that he […]
The archive at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation contains a box full of house keys, some of which date back as far as 1968. These keys are accompanied by a hand drawn chart that indicates the uses for several of the keys, and allows us to trace for which of his houses Burgess used them. […]
Burgess and the idea of a single European language
Anthony Burgess’s view of Europe, by Will Carr