A new selection of Burgess’s essays about music will be published on 25 January. Music surrounded Burgess throughout his early years in Manchester. He came from a family of musicians: his mother had been a music-hall singer, and his father played piano in pubs, music halls and silent cinemas. In his book about music and […]

Anthony Burgess died in London on 22 November 1993. He was 76 years old and had been diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year previously. The final phase of his life was characterised by intense creative production, in a variety of forms. The publication of a long novel about the rediscovery of the sword […]

Preserving the Burgess Foundation’s collection of books, archival records, and objects is an ongoing challenge. Time spent in countries such as Malaya and Brunei, as well as travels throughout Europe, America, and the UK, brought with it exposure to termites, damp, floods, heat, and sunlight. Such conditions, coupled with frequent handling and the passage of […]

In 2021, the youthful Manchester-based chamber ensemble No Dice Collective recorded a pair of seldom played compositions by Anthony Burgess, his Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor and Quartet for Flute, Oboe, ’Cello and Piano. Composed nearly forty years apart, these two works highlight complementary aspects of Burgess’s musical style. The concerto […]

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 present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]

The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD researcher Milena Schwab-Graham writes about her work on the extensive Anthony Burgess cassette tape collection. In This Man and Music (1982), Anthony Burgess’s collection of essays exploring the interconnections between music and literature, he calls himself a ‘faker, a patcher, something […]

In the second blog post from our archive volunteers, Vivian Pencz shares her experience of working with one of Anthony Burgess’s unpublished notebooks as part of a remote transcription project.   ‘Journal of the Plague Year 1951,’ declared the title of the first Burgess notebook I transcribed as a new Archive Volunteer for the Foundation. […]

Raymond Yiu is a composer who first discovered the work of Anthony Burgess in the 1990s when he picked up a copy of This Man and Music in a second-hand bookshop. This led to a fascination with Burgess’s writing and music, which eventually inspired Raymond to compose The World Was Once All Miracle, an orchestral […]

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 […]

It’s one thing to collate an archive collection: it’s another thing to preserve it. We explore some newly conserved books in our archive. Preserving and safeguarding the collection of books, archival records and objects belonging to Anthony Burgess is at the heart of the Burgess Foundation’s mission, and all those who access, manage and use […]