Looking back on the life and work of Llewela Jones (1920-1968). Anthony Burgess’s first wife, born Llewela Jones and later known as Lynne, would have celebrated her 100th birthday on 24 November 2020. Many readers are familiar with the portrait of her given by Burgess in his two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big […]
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. Throughout his writing career Anthony Burgess was inspired by the conflict between the teachings of Saint Augustine and the British monk Pelagius. Augustine, […]
To celebrate the reopening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, we look at Burgess’s identity as a Mancunian. Anthony Burgess left Manchester in 1940 and returned frequently in later years. The city and its people appear many times in Burgess’s writing — Manchester accents, landmarks, and even smells pervade his literary work. Remembering […]
To celebrate the post-lockdown reopening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, based in Anthony Burgess’s birth city of Manchester, we take a look at Burgess’s identity as a Mancunian. Anthony Burgess was born and educated in Manchester. His formative years in the city awakened in him a life-long love of literature, music, drama, and learning. […]
As Christine Lee Gengaro, editor of the new Irwell Edition of This Man and Music, points out, ‘The book might more accurately have been called This Man, Music, and Literature, or Music, Literature, and This Man. But as it stands, the title This Man and Music is misleading.’ Indeed it is, for less than a […]
When the atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, more than 140,000 people lost their lives, either in the blast itself or as a result of radiation sickness afterwards. This catastrophic event inaugurated a new era in world history and politics. From 1945 onwards, everyone would be living in the shadow […]
We’ve been so busy exploring the works of the writer Anthony Burgess that we feel we’ve ignored the works of another great writer: Kenneth Toomey, the playwright protagonist of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. One of Burgess’s themes in Earthly Powers is the distance between artistic integrity and commercial success. His protagonist Kenneth Toomey harbours ambitions 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 […]
Throughout his career, Anthony Burgess emphasised his status as a Mancunian who defined himself in opposition to the London literary establishment. In his biography of Shakespeare (1970), he draws parallels between himself and the playwright’s childhood and education away from the capital. Yet, like Shakespeare, Burgess was drawn to London from the provinces, and the […]
Anthony Burgess wrote about Christmas in a number of different contexts. His responses are always distinctive and flavoursome, like a glass of Madeira or a traditional British Christmas pudding, stuffed with fruit and sixpence coins. In the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess recalls that one of his earliest published […]