Introduction to One Man’s Chorus by Ben Forkner This memoir of Anthony Burgess appeared as the introduction to One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings, a selection of Burgess’s journalism, edited by Ben Forkner and published in New York by Carroll & Graf in 1998. We are grateful to Ben Forkner for kindly giving permission to reproduce […]

In 1969 Anthony Burgess started a month-long residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was an important period for Burgess in many ways, giving him his first extended visit to an American university campus, and it helped to develop the American influence on novels such as MF and Earthly Powers. While […]

This essay was written in 1983, when Burgess’s verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi in the leading role. The production was a great success: Michael Billington, the long-standing theatre critic of the Guardian, wrote about the ‘bold, emotionally unashamed’ […]

Although A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’s best-known novel, many readers regard Earthly Powers as his masterpiece. When the novel was first published in October 1980, Burgess received a telegram from his French translator, who wrote: ‘It is your Ulysses.’ Unlike most of Burgess’s novels, which he wrote in the space of a few months, […]

‘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’, […]

Burgess and the idea of a single European language