2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we are presenting an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month we’ll be sharing […]
The Burgess Foundation’s archive collection is at the heart of what we do. The collection forms the core of our charitable mission to encourage interest in the life and work of Anthony Burgess. It’s important to us that as many people as possible access our collection, even when the building is closed. Whether you’re completing a […]
Before lockdown, we curated an exhibition of portraits of Anthony Burgess, chosen from our collection of thousands of images. We look forward to showing you that exhibition when we reopen. In the meantime, to save you waiting, we asked staff at the Burgess Foundation to pick out some of their favourite images from the exhibition. […]
Here are some highlights from our exhibition Portraits of Anthony Burgess. Anthony Burgess was one of the most photographed writers of the twentieth century. Our collection contains more than 9000 images and paintings, a rich document of his life created by leading artists, and his friends and family. The images show his early life in […]
Beard’s Roman Women is an odd book. The title, changed by the American publisher from Rome in the Rain, seems to suggest a historical novel, set in the Roman Empire. The text is partnered with strange photographs of ghostly Roman monuments, reflected in puddles and in glass. The story is clearly autobiographical yet is told […]
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. […]
One of the more unexpected items in the photographic collection at the Burgess Foundation is a Polaroid of Burgess with the French musician Jean-Michel Jarre and the actress Charlotte Rampling. The photograph dates from around the mid-1980s, and the exact circumstances in which the picture was taken are not known. However, Burgess and Jarre maintained […]
The photographic collections at the Anthony Burgess Foundation span Burgess’s entire life, from his Manchester childhood in the 1910s and 1920s, through his war years, to his latter years as an international man of letters. Perhaps the most evocative images are those taken in Malaya during the 1950s, when he worked as a school teacher […]
These pictures, dating from between 1955 and 1957, have recently been discovered in the Burgess Foundation’s archive. They show Burgess in front of his class at the Malayan Teachers’ Training College in Kota Bharu. The blackboard behind him shows that he is teaching phonetics. Remembering his time in Malaysia, Burgess writes, ‘I taught potential teachers […]
These pictures reveal a very familiar image of Anthony Burgess: the smoker. Burgess’s relationship with tobacco is well documented in images throughout the archive and he’s rarely pictured without a cigarette or his favoured Schimmelpenninck Duet cigar. The archive includes many pieces of smoking paraphernalia, including tins of cigars, ashtrays, gas lighters and a large […]