John Burgess Wilson was born on February 25 , 1917 in Harpurhey , a northeastern quarter of Manchester , to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. He was known in childhood as Jack. Later, on his Confirmation , the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson. It was not until 1956 that he was to conceive and to begin to use the pen-name Anthony Burgess.
He lost his mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, at the age of one. She was a casualty of the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic ("Spanish flu"), which also took the life of his sister Muriel. Elizabeth, who is buried in a Protestant cemetery in Manchester (the City of Manchester General Cemetery, Rochdale Road), had been a minor actress and dancer who appeared at Manchester music halls such as the Ardwick Empire and the Gentlemen's Concert Rooms. Her stage name, according to Burgess was "The Beautiful Belle Burgess", but there has never been any independent verification of this - no playbills have yet been discovered that include the name.
Burgess described his father, Joseph Wilson, as descended from an "Augustinian Catholic" background, which probably refers to recusancy. Burgess ''père'' was among other things an army corporal, a Bookie , a pub pianoplayer, a pianist in movie theaters (accompanying the silent films of the era – see the novel ''The Pianoplayers''), an encyclopaedia salesman, a butcher, and a tobacconist. Burgess described Joseph, who remarried (to a Pub landlady), as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father".
Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother, whom he detested (he included a slatternly caricature of her in the Enderby novels). His childhood was in large part a solitary one. His home was rooms above an Off-licence and newsagent's-tobacconist's shop that his aunt ran, and above a pub.
Burgess was schooled at St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School, and later at Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School in Moss Side . For some years his family lived on Princess Street in the same district.
Good grades from Bishop Bilsborrow resulted in a place at the noted Manchester Catholic secondary school, Xaverian College . It was during his teenage years at this school that he lapsed formally from Catholicism, although he cannot be said to have broken completely with the Church.
He entered the University Of Manchester in 1937, graduating three years later with the degree of Bachelor Of Arts , 2nd class honours, upper division, in English language and literature. His thesis was on the subject of Marlowe 's '' Doctor Faustus ''.
He had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in physics – then a requirement for the subject – were deemed not high enough to qualify for a place on the programme.
Burgess's father died of flu in 1938 and his stepmother of a heart attack in 1940.
In 1940 Burgess began a rather unheroic wartime stint with the military, beginning with the Royal Army Medical Corps , which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth , Northumberland . During this period he sometimes directed an army dance band. He later moved to the Army Educational Corps , where among other things he conducted speech therapy at a mental hospital. He failed in his aspiration to win an officer's commission.
In 1942 the marriage took place in Bournemouth between Burgess and a Welshwoman named Llewela Jones, eldest daughter of a high-school headmaster. She was known to all as "Lynne". Although Burgess indicated on numerous occasions that her full name was Llewela Isherwood Jones, the name "Isherwood" does not appear on her birth certificate. Nor was Lynne related to the writer Christopher Isherwood as many people had believed. Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at Manchester University . Their marriage was childless, and, to put it mildly, tempestuous. She died of Cirrhosis in 1968.
Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar at an army garrison (see '' A Vision Of Battlements ''). Here he was a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching German, Russian, French and Spanish, and helped instruct the troops in " The British Way And Purpose ". He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the UK Ministry Of Education .
Burgess left the army with the rank of Sergeant-major in 1946, and was for the next four years a lecturer in speech and drama at the Mid-West School of Education near Wolverhampton and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College (known as "the Brigg" and associated with the University Of Birmingham ) near Preston .
At the end of 1950 he took a job as a Secondary School teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School (now defunct) in the market town of Banbury , Oxfordshire (see ''The Worm and the Ring'', which the then Mayoress of Banbury claimed libeled her). In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to supervise sports from time to time, and he ran the school's drama society.
The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life. Thanks to financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple was able to put a downpayment on a cottage in the picturesque village of Adderbury , not far from Banbury.
Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time. These involved local people and students and included productions of T.S. Eliot 's ''Sweeney Agonistes'' (Burgess had named his Adderbury cottage Little Gidding, after one of Eliot's '' Four Quartets '') and Aldous Huxley 's ''The Gioconda Smile''.
It was in Adderbury that Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the ''Banbury Guardian''.
The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, especially The Bell and The Red Lion, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time. Both he and his wife are believed to have been barred from one or more of the Adderbury pubs because of their riotous behaviour.
In January 1954 Burgess was interviewed by the British Colonial Office for a post in Malaya (now Malaysia ) as a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service. He was offered the job and accepted with alacrity, being keen to explore Eastern lands. Several months later he and his wife travelled to Singapore by the liner ''Willem Ruys'' from Southampton with stops in Port Said and Colombo .
Burgess was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar , the royal town in Perak , in what were then known as the Federated Malay States . Here he taught at the Malay College , dubbed "the Eton of the East" and now known as Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK).
In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a Housemaster in charge of students of the Preparatory School , who were housed at a Victorian mansion known as "King's Pavilion". The building had once been occupied by the British Resident in Perak. And the edifice had gained notoriety during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the '' Kempeitai '' (Japanese secret police).
As his novels and autobiography document, Burgess's late 1950s coincided with the communist insurgency, an undeclared war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) when rubber planters and members of the European community – not to mention many Malays, Chinese and Tamils – were subject to frequent terrorist attack.
Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, an alleged dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife, Burgess was posted elsewhere – the couple occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was supposedly minimal. This was the professed reason for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu , Kelantan . Kota Bharu is situated on the Siamese border; the Thais had ceded the area to the British in 1909 and a British adviser had been installed.
Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written. The language was still at that time rendered in the adapted Arabic script known as Jawi . He spent much of his free time engaged in creative writing, "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it". He published his first novels, ''Time For A Tiger'', ''The Enemy in the Blanket'' and ''Beds in the East''. These became known as "The Malayan Trilogy" and were later to be published in one volume as '' The Long Day Wanes ''. During his time in the East he also wrote ''English Literature: A Survey for Students'', and this book was in fact the first Burgess work published (if we do not count an essay published in the youth section of the London ''Daily Express'' when Burgess was a child).
After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, Burgess took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan , Brunei , a sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo . Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled ''Devil of a State''. Although the novel dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African "sultanate" the like of Zanzibar .
About this time Burgess "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom while teaching history. He was expounding on the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party at the time. There were reports that he had been diagnosed as having an inoperable Brain Tumour , with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. This turned out to be wrong. He was, however, suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status. He may also have wished for a pretext to abandon teaching and get going full-time as a writer, having made a late start in the art of fiction.
Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration". But he gave a different account to the British arts and media veteran Jeremy Isaacs in 1987 when he said: "I was driven out of the Colonial Service for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons."
He was repatriated and relieved of his position in Brunei. He spent some time in a London hospital (see ''The Doctor Is Sick'') where he underwent cerebral tests that, as far as can be made out, proved negative.
On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.
The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove , near Brighton , on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby quartet of novels); in a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham , just down the road from the Jacobean house in Burwash where Rudyard Kipling lived; and in a terraced town house in Chiswick , a western inner suburb of London , conveniently located for the White City BBC television studios of which he was a frequent guest in this period.
A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to the USSR , calling at St Petersburg (then still called Leningrad), resulted in ''Honey For the Bears'' and inspired some of the invented slang for ''A Clockwork Orange''.
By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a Tax Exile . It was in grander accommodation this time; indeed, at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of houses and apartments numbering in the double figures.
He lived in a house he had bought at Lija , Malta , for a time, but problems with the state censor prompted a move to Rome . He maintained a flat in the Italian capital and a country house in Bracciano , and a property in Montalbuccio . There was a villa in Provence , in Callian of the Var, France , and an apartment just off Baker Street , London, very near the presumed home of Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
Burgess lived for two years in the United States , working as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1970) and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College Of New York (1972), and teaching creative writing at Columbia University . He had also been writer-in-residence at the University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill (1969) and at the University At Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University Of Iowa in 1975.
Eventually he settled in , Switzerland .
After Lynne's death in 1968 at the age of forty-seven of Liver Cirrhosis (see ''Beard's Roman Women''), he had remarried, at Hounslow register office, to Liliana Macellari , an Italian translator. He adopted as his stepson the latter's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.
Burgess once wrote: "I shall die somewhere in the Mediterranean lands, with an inaccurate obituary in the ''Nice-Matin'', unmourned, soon forgotten." In the event he was to die in the country of his birth. He returned to Twickenham , an outer suburb of London, where he owned a house, to die on November 22 , 1993 . He was 76 years old. His actual death (of Lung Cancer ) occurred at the Hospital Of St John And St Elizabeth in the St John's Wood neighbourhood of London. He is thought to have composed the novel ''Byrne'' on his deathbed.
It is believed he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Moston Cemetery in Manchester, but in the event they went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo.
The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, reads "Abba Abba", which has several denotations: (1) the Hebrew for "Father, father", that is, an invocation to God as Father ('', which achieved world fame in the 1970s when Burgess was himself at the height of his powers (though it has been pointed out that this could be a mere confusion of correlation for causation); (4) part of the rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan Sonnet ; (5) the last words Jesus uttered, in Aramaic , from the Cross; (6) the Burgess novel about the death of Keats, '' Abba Abba ''; and (7) the abba rhyme scheme that Tennyson used for his poem on death, ''In Memoriam''.
Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade, dying aged 37 in 2002.
With the Malayan trilogy (''Time For A Tiger'', ''The Enemy in the Blanket'' and ''Beds in the East''), his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya). It joins a family of such Eastern fictional explorations, including George Orwell 's Burma ('' Burmese Days ''), E.M. Forster 's India ('' A Passage To India '') and Graham Greene 's Viet Nam ('' The Quiet American ''). Burgess thereby continues in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham .
Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese , necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi , having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay . This linguistic command results in an impressive verisimilitude and understanding of indigenous concerns in the trilogy.
Burgess's repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just the Enderby cycle but the neglected ''The Right to an Answer'', which touches on the theme of death and dying, and ''One Hand Clapping'' (to which the director Francis Coppola has recently acquired the film rights), partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. This era also witnessed the publication of '' The Worm And The Ring '', which was withdrawn from circulation under the threat of libel action from one of Burgess's former co-workers.
A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a Motion Picture Adaptation ), the dystopian ''tour de force'' '' A Clockwork Orange '' (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynne was allegedly robbed and assaulted in London during the blackout by deserters from the U.S. Army (an event that may have contributed to a miscarriage she suffered), the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young Anti-hero , Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more especially the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.
Then came '' Nothing Like The Sun '', a fictional recreation of Shakespeare's love-life and an examination of the (partly syphilitic, it was implied) sources of the bard's imaginative vision. The novel, which made some use of Edgar I. Fripp 's 1938 biography ''Shakespeare, Man and Artist'', won critical acclaim and placed Burgess in the front rank of novelists of his generation.
By the 1970s his output had become highly experimental, and some see a falling-off in this period. Indeed, Burgess has been considered by some critics to be uneven in the quality of his output, and he has been faulted for what has been called a "novelettish kind of dialogue". The bold and extraordinarily complex ''MF'' (1971) showed the influence of campervan). Burgess was frequently criticised for writing too many novels and too quickly. All the same, '' Beard '' was revealing on a personal level, dealing with the death of his first wife, his bereavement, and the affair that led to his second marriage.
In another ambitious and unashamedly modernist fictional expedition, ''Napoleon Symphony'', Burgess brought Bonaparte to life by shaping the novel's structure on Beethoven 's '' Eroica '' symphony. The ''tour de force'' that results from this daring fictional experiment contains among many other assets a superb portrait of an Arab and Muslim society under occupation by a Christian western power ( Egypt by a Catholic France). The novel showed that while Burgess always regarded himself as little more than a student and epigone of Joyce , he was able at times to equal the master of modernism in literary sophistication and range.
There was a triumphant return to form in the 1980s, when religious themes began to weigh heavy (see ''The Kingdom of the Wicked'' and ''Man of Nazareth'' as well as ''Earthly Powers''). Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic "training" and worldview remained strong in his work all his life. This is notable in the discussion of free will in ''A Clockwork Orange'', and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church – due to what can be understood as Satanic influence – in '' Earthly Powers '' (1980). That work was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.
He kept working through his final illness, and was writing on his deathbed. A late novel was '' Any Old Iron '', a generational saga about two families, one Russian-Welsh, the other Jewish. It encompasses the sinking of the Titanic, WWI, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, and the early years of the State of Israel, as well as the imagined rediscovery of King Arthur's Excalibur. '' A Dead Man In Deptford '', about Christopher Marlowe, is a kind of companion volume to his Shakespeare novel '' Nothing Like The Sun ''. The verse novel '' Byrne '' was published posthumously.
Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text for newcomers to the subject, ''English Literature, A Survey for Students'', which is still used in many schools today. He followed this with ''The Novel Today'' and ''The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction''.
Then came the Joyce studies ''Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader'' (also published as ''Re Joyce''), ''Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce'', and ''A Shorter Finnegan's Wake''.
His Encyclopædia Britannica entry ''The Novel'' of 1970 is regarded as a classic of the genre.
Burgess has written full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. His '' Ninety-nine Novels : The Best in English Since 1939'' remains an invaluable guide, while the published lecture ''Obscenity and the Arts'' explores issues of pornography.
Burgess was a polyglot, with a command of Malay , Russian , French , German , Spanish , Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English , as well as of some Hebrew , Japanese , Chinese , Swedish and Persian .
"Burgess's linguistic training," write Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'', "is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronunciations and the niceties of register."
His interest in linguistics was reflected in the Anglo-Russian invented teen Slang of ''A Clockwork Orange'' (called Nadsat ) and in the film '' Quest For Fire '' (1981), for which he Invented a prehistoric language for the characters to speak.
The hero of ''The Doctor is Sick'', Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is a lecturer in linguistics. He escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech".
Burgess, who had lectured on phonetics at the University of Birmingham in the late 1940s, investigates the field of linguistics in '' Language Made Plain '' and '' A Mouthful Of Air ''.
Burgess produced journalism in British, Italian, French and American newspapers and magazines regularly – even compulsively – and in prodigious quantities. or test-driving the new Fiat 500 ."
"He was our star reviewer, always eager to take on something new, punctilious with deadlines, length and copy," wrote Burgess's literary editor at the ''Observer'', Michael Ratcliffe.
Selections of Burgess's journalism are to be found in ''Urgent Copy'', ''Homage to QWERT YUIOP'' and ''One Man's Chorus''.
Burgess wrote the screenplays for '' Moses The Lawgiver '' (Gianfranco De Bosio 1975, with Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quayle and Ingrid Thulin), '' Jesus Of Nazareth '' (Franco Zeffirelli 1977, with Robert Powell, Olivia Hussey and Rod Steiger), and '' A.D. '' (Stuart Cooper 1985, with Ava Gardner, Anthony Andrews and James Mason).
He devised the stone-age language for '' La Guerre Du Feu '' ('' Quest For Fire '') (Jean-Jacques Annaud 1981, with Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nicholas Kadi).
He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called ''Will!'' or ''The Bawdy Bard''. It was based on his novel ''Nothing Like The Sun''.
As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He was an accomplished musician and composed regularly throughout his life.
His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio . His Symphony (No. 3) in C was premiered by the University Of Iowa orchestra in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in ''This Man and Music''.
''Sinfoni Melayu'', characterised by the Burgess biographer Roger Lewis as "Elgar with bongo-bong drums", was described by Burgess, its composer, as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".
The structure of the novel ''Napoleon Symphony'' (1974) was modelled on Beethoven 's Eroica Symphony , while ''Mozart and the Wolf Gang'' (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition.
Burgess made plain his low regard for the popular music that has emerged since the mid-1960s, yet he has been called "the godfather of punk" as a result of the nihilist future world he created in ''A Clockwork Orange''.
When Burgess was heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation's '', Rejoice in the Lord Alway; Bach , Goldberg Variations No 13; Elgar , Symphony No.1 in A flat major; Wagner , Walter's Trial Song from ''Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg;'' Debussy , Fêtes; Lambert , The Rio Grande; Walton , Symphony No.1 in B flat; and Vaughan Williams , On Wenlock Edge.
Burgess produced a translation of Bizet's '' Carmen '' which was performed by the English National Opera .
He created an Operetta based on James Joyce 's '' Ulysses '' called '' Blooms Of Dublin '' (composed in 1982 and performed on the BBC), and composed the music for the 1971 Minneapolis production of his '' Cyrano De Bergerac '' translation, adapting the Rostand play for Broadway.
His new libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based opera company Scottish Opera .
- "I start at the beginning, go to the end, then stop," Burgess once said. He revealed in and the act of writing itself as indispensable guides. He does not produce a draft of a whole novel which he then revises, but prefers to get one page finished before he goes on to the next, which involves a good deal of revision and correction."
- His output from when he began writing professionally in his early forties until his death was to produce, at a minimum, 1,000 words of fair copy per day, weekends included, 365 days a year. His favoured time for working was the afternoon, since "the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon".
- Anthony Burgess had a long-term peeve of being confused with members of the and another Anthony Blunt . Unfortunately, by the time they achieved notoriety, Anthony Burgess's pen-name was well established. He succeeded in extracting an apology from the Paris-based '' International Herald Tribune '' in 1983 after the newspaper referred to him in a print as "The spy, Anthony Burgess". The '' Sunday Times '' newspaper perpetrated a similar error in 1999, referring to "the other British defectors, Anthony Burgess, Donald Maclean and George Blake ".
- Burgess is believed by some, though this is highly conjectural, to have engaged in low-level espionage during his Gibraltar, Malaya and Brunei years and possibly later. See, for example, the London '') with information about any Communist actions or sympathies, however trivial, among his colleagues and students and, after his return from the East, among the people he met and associated with. Since lives were at stake during the Malayan Emergency , this would not have been an unusual or exceptionable activity – in fact it might well have been regarded as irresponsible not to assist in this way. The term used for an operative of this type and pay-grade was "ground observer".
- Military authorities who came across a copy of Joyce's '' Finnegans Wake '' in Burgess's possession in 1941 thought it was some kind of code book.
- Burgess published a fictional work in the Ian Fleming genre which he entitled ''Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel'' (1966).
- He wrote the preface to the Bond novels under the Coronet imprint.
- Burgess prepared a screenplay for the James Bond feature ''The Spy Who Loved Me'', which Albert R. Broccoli produced in 1977. It was turned down. Burgess wrote: "My script...was rejected, but my oil tanker (a camouflaged floating palace for the chief villain) was retained."
- Burgess was a Lancastrian , so it is no surprise that one of his favourite dishes, mentioned many times in his novels, autobiography and elsewhere, was Lancashire Hotpot . The journalist Auberon Waugh described Burgess's recipe for hotpot as "disgusting".
- Burgess often praised a delicacy local to his birthplace of Harpurhey known as Cow-heel Pie .
- Burgess was by most accounts a heavy consumer of alcoholic beverages, especially, during his Adderbury years, of Cider , and of Gin in later life. He did not drink as heavily as his first wife Lynne, who lost her life to Liver Cirrhosis ; yet when the couple were living at Etchingham, they are reported to have consumed half a dozen bottles of gin a week.
- Burgess created his own , Whisky , Rum , Port and Brandy . A small bottle of Stout is added and the whole topped up with Champagne ... It tastes very smooth, induces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover."
- In his middle years Burgess often drank Beer , and in Malaya the two brands he enjoyed were Tiger and Anchor beer, brewed in both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. He reveals in his autobiography that he was hoping after his ''Time For A Tiger'' was published to receive a complimentary case of Tiger beer from the manufacturer. The brewery was slow to oblige, only supplying a case several decades later when Burgess had achieved worldwide fame. "Alas," Burgess wrote, "I had become wholly a gin man."
- Burgess is thought to have cut his alcohol consumption to some extent in later life, often substituting tea. For his morning "cuppa", he habitually suffused up to six tea-bags per small teapot. And when drinking tea from a (pint-sized) mug at other times of the day, multiple tea-bags were also used. His preferred brand of tea was Twining's Irish Breakfast. He said of his dietary habits: "I drink two gallons of overstrong tea each day and mumble a bit of stale bread."
- Burgess smoked, by his own admission, up to 80 Cigarette s, Panatela s, Cigars , Cigarillo s and/or Cheroot s per day. He described his habit as "a patriotic duty to the Exchequor " (tax accounts for over 80% of the price of a pack of cigarettes in England). Burgess's preferred cigar was the Schimmelpenninck Duet. High nicotene ingestion was the cause of the Bürger's Disease Burgess suffered, and of the Lung Cancer that killed him.
- Burgess was an occasional smoker of Opium , which he described as "a fine drug", during both his Kota Bharu and Brunei years. But he was under no illusions as to its negative effects: "Later, abetted by an ailing liver, the bad visions would come," he wrote.
- He once became an unwitting smuggler of opium. In 1957 Graham Greene asked him to bring some Chinese silk shirts back with him on furlough from Kuala Lumpur. As soon as Burgess handed over the shirts, Greene pulled out a knife and severed the cuffs, into which opium pellets had been sewn.
- Burgess evinced qualified approval towards the smoking of '', which is an admirable thing in itself, but no end of anything..."
- Burgess made no secret of his determination throughout his career to thwart Tax authorities worldwide. "I will, naturally, cheat the fiscal tyrants, but it would be inhuman not to," he wrote.
- Burgess's preferred medium of payment for his work, he indicated, was "non-taxable cash", and he maintained one or more Swiss Bank accounts.
- He kept to a strict personal rule of not accepting a publisher's advance on work not written.
- Burgess's house in Lija , Malta , was confiscated by the Maltese authorities over non-payment of taxes.
- Burgess was a currency smuggler. His house in Bracciano was, he wrote, paid for "by smuggling dollar royalty cheques into the {Link without Title} peninsula and paying them into the bank account of an expatriate American sculptor living near Rome".
- His move to Monaco in 1974 was prompted by the knowledge that there is no income tax in the principality, and moreover that his widow Liliana would not be required to pay death duties on his estate.
- Burgess claimed that '' Holofernes '' was in Elizabethan times used as a slang word for '' Penis ''.
- He prepared a translation of the Roman pornographic poetry of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli . It was never published. However, he produced what the poet and critic Anthony Thwaite has called "cheeky imitations" of Belli's satirical sonnets in the novel '' Abba Abba ''.
- His first wife Lynne is believed to have conducted a short-lived adulterous affair with Dylan Thomas . Burgess also knew Thomas slightly, and greatly admired his work.
- In Burgess's novel ''Time For A Tiger'', the Malay state of Perak is named ''Lanchap'', which is the Malay word for ''masturbate'' .
- Burgess announced on several occasions – it appeared to be a matter of some pride – that he had never in his life had carnal relations with an Englishwoman .
- He enjoyed a miscellany of sexual partners from other lands, however, including Buginese , Japanese , Welsh , Malay , Chinese , Siamese , Italian and Singhalese women. And he wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, ''Little Wilson and Big God'' (p. 386), that he had had sexual encounters "with Tamil women blacker than Africans , including a girl who could not have been older than twelve, but none with Bengalis and Punjabis ". The vast majority of the liaisons had been, as he put it, "sadly commercial".
- In Burgess's novel ''Beds in the East'', one of the principal characters is named ''Mahalingam'', which is "great phallus" in Tamil .
- Burgess was occasionally troubled, especially in his earlier years, by the problem of Premature Ejaculation and writes comically about it in the Enderby tetralogy and elsewhere. But he claimed later to have discovered the secret of controlling climax and prolonging pleasure during sexual congress. It was, he wrote, "a matter of reciting Milton only – 'High on a throne of royal state...' ('' Paradise Lost '', Book Two)."
- The comedian Benny Hill described Burgess as "the greatest living expert on sex".
- When Burgess applied for the job of schoolteacher at Banbury Grammar school in 1950, he claimed in his résumé to be the co-author, with "Dr H.P. Bridges", of a soon-to-be-published work entitled ''Engelsk Grammatik''. This was a complete fabrication.
- London's '' Daily Mail '' newspaper published in the 1960s a number of comically puritanical letters written by Burgess purporting to be from an Indian Muslim named "Mohammed Ali", who expressed for the benefit of ''Mail'' readers his utter disgust at the degradation of contemporary western morals.
- In the novel ''The Enemy in the Blanket'', Burgess calls the state's main town ''Kenching'', which is "urine" in Malay, while another place is named ''Tahi Panas'' ("steaming excrement").
- Burgess was sacked as literary critic for the English provincial newspaper the '' Yorkshire Post '' after he wrote a review of his own ''Inside Mr Enderby'' and it appeared in the newspaper. The novel had been published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell, and the newspaper's editor did not know that Kell was Burgess. Burgess protested, to no avail, that Walter Scott had also once reviewed one of his own novels. The offending review, which was not at all commendatory, read in part: "This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals...and halitosis. It may well make some people sick....It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock." (borborygm, noun, from Greek ''borborugmos'', a rumbling in the bowels – ''OED'')
- Burgess's contempt for post-World War Two popular music was thinly veiled. Its proponents are merciliessly satirised in ''Enderby Outside'', which features a lamentable Rock band called Yod Crewsy and the Fixers, who composed "emetic little songs".
- Ironically in view of this, Burgess has been dubbed "the Godfather of Punk " because of the vivid nihilist world he created in the novel ''A Clockwork Orange''.
- The Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was a great admirer of Burgess's novel ''A Clockwork Orange''. And shortly after it came out in 1962, Mick Jagger indicated that he wished to take the role of Alex in a putative movie version. The other members of The Rolling Stones were to be his droogs.
- The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone at the cemetery in Monte Carlo includes a (possibly ironic) reference to the pop group Abba , who enjoyed huge success at a time – the late 1970s – when Burgess, too, had achieved world fame.
- There has been a great deal of pop-world plagiarism from Burgess. To take just three examples more or less at random:
- The Sheffield electropop band Heaven 17 paid Burgess the compliment of naming themselves after a band that appears in Burgess's 1962 novel ''A Clockwork Orange'' (though they dropped the "the").
- Another Sheffield group, Moloko , took its name from Burgess's (Russian-derived) Nadsat word for a drug-spiked milk drink.
- The German punk rockers Die Toten Hosen 's album ''Ein kleines bisschen Horrorshow'' referred to the Nadsat term, and Poland's Myslovitz produced an album called ''Korova Milky Bar''.
- Burgess's first published work was an essay on Torbay for the children's section of the London '' Daily Express '' newspaper in 1928.
- Burgess was placed 1,579th after taking England's Customs & Excise test in 1928.
- One of Burgess's professors at Manchester University was A.J.P. Taylor . Grading one of Burgess's term papers, the great historian wrote: "Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge."
- During his years in Malaya, and after he had mastered Jawi , the Arabic script adapted for Malay, Burgess taught himself the Persian Language , after which he produced an authoritative translation of Eliot's '' The Waste Land '' into Persian. It was never published, in Tehran or elsewhere. He also worked on an anthology of the best of English literature translated into Malay, which also failed to achieve publication.
- Anthony Burgess, known in Argentina as the British Borges, and Jorge Luis Borges , known in Britain as the Argentine Burgess, each spoke both English and Spanish fluently. But when Burgess and Borges met, each decided it would be unequal and unfair to the other, and inappropriate, to plump for either of the two languages when conversing. So the polyglot pair forged a compromise, deciding to conduct their lengthy, wide-ranging philological and literary conversations in Old Norse . (However, this may be apocryphal: another account has them merely reciting a poem in Old English together.)
- Burgess's multilingual proficiency came under discussion in Malay . Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; it was the girls in question who did not." Lewis may not have been fully aware of the fact that a quarter of Malaysia's population is made up of Hokkien - and Cantonese -speaking Chinese . However, Malay had been installed as the National Language with the installation of the Language Act of 1967. By 1982 all national primary and secondary schools in Malaysia would have been teaching with Bahasa Melayu as a base language (see Harold Crouch, ''Government and Society in Malaysia'', Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). It would be unlikely that the Chinese waitresses were completely unable to understand Malay, given the kind of power Malay had as a language of communication and organization in the country. They were probably very capable of speaking the language; one might ask, rather, whether they were refusing to do so with Burgess for political reasons.
- Burgess suffered from Daltonism or Colour-blindness .
- He was Short-sighted , although reluctant to wear spectacles. He claimed that he once walked into a bank, lent against the counter and ordered a drink.
- He was afflicted by Dyspepsia , Constipation and Flatulence during much of his life, difficulties that are dwelt on to comic effect in the '' Enderby ''cycle of novels.
- He was diagnosed by a physician in Tunbridge Wells , Kent, as suffering from Bürger's Disease . He described the symptoms thus: "toothache in the right calf, and a sudden accession of pins and needles, like a monstrous toilet flush, in the right foot."
- Burgess suffered what was reported as a collapse in Brunei Town in 1959, apparently occasioned by overwork, indications of incipient (rather than chronic) Alcoholism , and poor Nutrition . He had to be airlifted to England for tests and treatment. When he was repatriated, he was treated by the neurologist Roger Bannister , who in his days as an athlete had been the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. Burgess claimed to have been trepanned by Dr Bannister.
- He suffered from what he referred to as The Writer's Evil ( Haemorrhoids ).
- Burgess had a bout of Chickenpox in 1969.
- He had High Blood Pressure , which caused problems with his arteries.
- Burgess was addicted to Tobacco . He was diagnosed with Lung Cancer at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in October 1992, and was shortly thereafter to die of the disease at the age of 76.
- He walked with a limp and often carried a stick.
- He used Dexedrine to aid concentration while working.
- Burgess nursed a lifelong hatred for Physical Fitness and its advocates and exponents. He conceived this antipathy in wartime Gibraltar, where the British army put himself and other soldiers through a compulsory, and gruelling, programme of exercise. "Keep-fit men," he once stated, "are no good in bed." One of the reasons he despised J.D.R. ("Jimmy") Howell, headmaster of the Malay College where he taught in the 1950s, was that Howell was an enthusiastic rugby-player.
- He suffered from trigeminal neuralgia. He had a cyst in his back.
- Anthony Burgess was known to many people in Italy, where he lived for several years, as Antonio Borghese.
- Burgess also published under his real name John Burgess Wilson and the pen-name Joseph Kell.
- Burgess considered the composer Derek Bourgeois to be his alter ego.
- There is a 17th-century Anthony Burgess, also a writer. A Pastor at a church in Sutton Coldfield , Anthony Burgess was the author of such works as ''The Doctrine of Original Sin'' and ''A Vindication of the Moral Law''. The modern Burgess had an ambivalent attitude towards conversion. He tended to contrast, in certain respects unfavourably or at least cynically, the camp of cradle Catholics, in which was included such writers as Belloc , Joyce , Braine , Lodge and himself, with that of converts such as Hopkins , Chesterton , Greene , Waugh and Spark . So it may be significant that his namesake Pastor Anthony Burgess's most important work is entitled ''Spiritual Refining: The Anatomy of True & False Conversion''. Still regarded as useful, it remains in print, and is published by International Outreach Incorporated.
- There is another 20th-century Anthony Burgess, also a writer. Like his more famous namesake, Anthony Burgess was fascinated by musical theatre and authored two acclaimed works on the subject, ''The Notary in Opera'' (1994) and ''The Notary and Other Lawyers in Gilbert and Sullivan'' (1997). A noted linguist, notary public and sometime Master of The Worshipful Company Of Scriveners of the City of London (aka The Mysterie of Writers of the Court Lettern), Anthony Burgess was a partner in the firm of Cheeswright, Casey & Murly. He lived from 1925 to 2006. Given their shared interest in opera and foreign languages, it is interesting to speculate on whether the two Anthony Burgesses ever met.
- There is a 21st-century Anthony Burgess, an eminent banker who is head of European mergers & acquisitions at Deutsche Bank.
- Burgess was arguably as prodigious a creator of Nonce Word s and Neologism s, especially in ''A Clockwork Orange'' but across the whole range of his work, as Frank Gelett Burgess of "blurb", "bleesh", "bromide" and "gloogo" fame.
- Burgess's birthplace of Harpurhey offers a sharp contrast to Monte Carlo , where he spent most of his latter years. Harpurhey was described in a 2004 London '' Independent On Sunday '' article by Ian Herbert North as "the most miserable place in Britain". North reveals that two neighbourhoods in Harpurhey are classified by the UK government as among the five most deprived in the country.
- Harpurhey is home to Bernard Manning's World Famous Embassy Club . The comedian Bernard Manning owns the venue, which is in Rochdale Road, very near Carisbrook Street where Burgess was born.
- The Little And Large comic duo started their careers in Harpurhey.
- Burgess was among a select group of celebrity owners of the classic Bedford Dormobile (a campervan or motorhome of the Bedford marque, manufactured in England by Vauxhall Motors ). He and his second wife spent, in the early years of their marriage, long periods on the road across western Europe, especially in France and Sicily, his wife driving the Dormobile while he wrote at a desk behind. He wrote that the Dormobile aided him in what he described as the "struggle against bourgeois conformity".
- He never learned how to drive a car.
- Burgess took his Siamese Cat , named Lalage, to Malaya with him. It had an enjoyable tour but died in Khota Bharu, within walking distance of the Siamese border.
- He had a Border Collie during his Etchingham days, which he named Hajji .
- Burgess wrote a full-length textbook in 1947 called ''The Young Fiddler's Tunebook''. It was never published.
- One of Burgess's last speaking engagements was at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1992. The subject of his address was 'translation', and Burgess quipped that he himself was 'shortly to be translated' (he died 13 months later).
- Burgess was pursued by the Military Police for desertion after overstaying his vacation away from Morpeth military base with his new bride Lynne in 1941.
- For a brief period during his studies of the Malay language and culture during the late 1950s, Burgess seriously considered becoming a (1978), Burgess imagines what Britain might be like if a virile, triumphant Islam won far-reaching influence in the country.
- He appears as a fictional character in '' magazine, 1995).
- He employed an Ethiopian maid at his New York apartment in the seventies.
- Burgess, along with Quentin Crisp , took the photographs included in the 1992 Overlook Press edition of Mervyn Peake's '' Titus Alone ''.
- Burgess sought unsuccessfully to make the critic and journalist Rhoda Koenig , architect of the Bad Sex In Fiction Award , his adopted daughter. He once sent her a review with the note: "To Miss Koenig, who persistently refuses to become my adopted daughter".
Burgessians are recommended to follow the trail in a 1960s-era Bedford Dormobile . The principal Burgess sites, travelling south to north from Brunei to Scotland, are as follows:
- Bandar Seri Begawan : Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College (workplace 1958-1959)
- (workplace 1954-55); King's Pavilion (former Residence of the Governor of Perak, Burgess residence 1954-55; now a girls' school)
- Kota Bharu , Kelantan : Malay Teachers' Training College (workplace 1955-1957)
- Lija : 168 Main Street (a ''palazzo'' in white marble); residence 1968-1970; house confiscated 1974
- Rome : 16A Piazza Santa Cecilia (residence from 1971)
- Deya : Mediterranean Institute (visiting professor, 1969)
- Tangiers : repeated visits in the 1960s
- Bracciano : 1-2, Piazza Padella (residence from 1970)
- Monte Carlo : 44 rue Grimaldi, Condamine district (residence from 1976); 9 rue Princess Marie-de-Lorraine, Princess Grace Irish Library (co-founder)
- Callian , the Var, Provence: rue des Muets (residence from 1976)
- Angers : 2, rue Alexandre Fleming (Anthony Burgess Center)
- Lugano : chalet, with nuclear shelter in cellar; residence from 1986
- Dormobile : occasional residence from 1968 to early 1970s
- Hove and Brighton , Sussex coast: apartments (residence 1959)
- Etchingham , East Sussex: ‘Applegarth' (semi-detached house), High Street, A265 road (residence 1959-1964)
- (leasehold years remaining terraced house purchased 1963, residence 1964-68); 63 Bickenhall Mansions, Bickenhall Street, off Baker Street (apartment, residence 1992-93); 60 Grove End Road, St John's Wood (Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth; deathplace 1993); Twickenham (house; date of purchase unknown but believed to be 1980s); Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Capper Street, Bloomsbury (patient 1959); Institute of Neurology, University College London at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, Queen Square, WC1 (patient 1959)
- Oxfordshire: Banbury , Banbury Grammar School (workplace 1950-1954); Adderbury , 44, Water Lane (labourer's two-bedroom cottage then named Little Gidding, residence 1950-54)
- , 1946 )
- , from 1928; "turned into a Muslim ghetto", Burgess later said); Manchester University (from 1937)
- Warrington : Peninsula Barracks (Infantry Training Centre, 1943)
- Preston : Bamber Bridge (Emergency Teacher Training College, 1948)
- Morpeth , Northumberland : Cheviot Hall (Burgess joined 189 Field Ambulance of the B Company, 1941)
- Austin, Texas : 21st and Guadalupe, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Trove of Burgessiana, with papers dating from 1956 to 1997, the bulk being 1970s and 1980s
- 1969
- 1970 -1971
- 1972 ; visiting professor at Columbia University 1972; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (lung cancer diagnosis, 1992)
- 1976
- Eskbank , near Edinburgh: Royal Army Medical Corps (joined 1940)
''"That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters."'' — Anthony Burgess.
- '''' (1958)
- '' The Novel To-day '' (1963)
- '' Language Made Plain '' (1964) (ISBN 0815202229)
- '''' (1965), also published as '' Re Joyce ''
- '' The Coaching Days Of England '' (1966) (editor)
- '' The Age Of The Grand Tour '' (1966) (co-editor with Francis Haskell)
- '''' (1967)
- '''' (journalism) (1968)
- '' Novel, The '' (Encyclopædia Britannica essay) (1970)
- '' Shakespeare '' (1970)
- 'What is Pornography?' (essay) in '' Perspectives On Pornography '', ed. Douglas A. Hughes (1970)
- '''' (1973)
- '' Obscenity And The Arts '' (1973)
- '' New York '' (1976)
- '' A Christmas Recipe '' (1977)
- '' Ernest Hemingway And His World '' (1978), also published as ''Ernest Hemingway''
- '' Scrissero In Inglese '' (1979) ("They Wrote in English", Italy only)
- '' This Man And Music '' (1982)
- '' On Going To Bed '' (1982)
- '''' (1984)
- '''' (1985)
- '''' (1986), also published as ''But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings''
- '' Little Wilson And Big God, Being The First Part Of The Confessions Of Anthony Burgess '' (Autobiography, Part 1) (1986)
- '' An Essay On Censorship '' (letter to Salman Rushdie in verse) (1989)
- '' You've Had Your Time, Being The Second Part Of The Confessions Of Anthony Burgess '' (Autobiography, Part 2) (1990)
- '''' (1991)
- '''' (1992) (ISBN 0688119352)
- '' Childhood '' (Penguin 60s) (1996)
- '''' (journalism) (1998)
- '''' (2001) (section)
- '' Return Trip To Tango '' (anthology of material published in ''Translation'' magazine) (2003) (section)
- 'A Manchester Overture' (1989)
- 'Tommy Reilly's Maggot', duet for harmonica and piano (1940s)
- 'Rome in the Rain', piano and orchestra (1976)
- '' Kalau Tuan Mudek Ka-Ulu '', five Malay Pantun s for soprano and native instruments (1955)
- 'Gibraltar', symphonic poem (1944)
- ''Dr Faustus'', one-act opera (1940)
- 'Trois Morceaux Irlandais', guitar quartet (1980s)
- ' Bethlehem Palm Trees ' ( Lope De Vega ) (1972)
- '' Chaika '', for ship's orchestra (1961; composed aboard the ''Baltika'' on voyage to Leningrad )
- 'Song of a Northern City', for piano and orchestra (1947)
- ' The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard ', 24 preludes and fugues for piano (1985)
- Partita for string orchestra (1951)
- 'Terrible Crystal: Three Hopkins sonnets for baritone, chorus and orchestra' (1952)
- 'Ludus Multitonalis' for recorder consort (1951)
- ' Lines For An Old Man ' (i.e. Eliot ) (1939)
- Concertino for piano and percussion (1951)
- Symphonies: 1937; 1956 ('' Sinfoni Melayu ''); 1975 (No. 3 in C)
- ''Sinfoni Malaya'' for orchestra and brass band, including cries of " Merdeka !" from the audience (1957)
- '' Mr W.S. '', ballet suite for orchestra (1979)
- ' Cabbage Face ', song for Vaudeville skit (1937)
- Sinfonietta for jazz combo
- ''Pando'', march for a P&O orchestra (1958)
- 'Everyone suddenly burst out singing' ( Sassoon ) for voices and piano (1942)
- Concertos for piano and flute
- ' The Ascent Of F6 ' ( Isherwood ), music for dance orchestra (1948)
- 'Ode: Celebration for a Malay College ', for boys' voices and piano (1954)
- 'Cantata for a Malay College ' (1954)
- Passacaglia for orchestra (1961)
- 'Song of the South Downs ' (1959)
- ' Mr Burgess's Almanack ', winds & percussion (1987)
- ''The Eyes of New York'' music score for movie project (1975)
- ' Ich Weiss Es Ist Aus ', group of cabaret songs (1939)
- Music for '' Will! '' (1968)
- Sonatas for piano (1946, 1951) and cello (1944)
- '' Trotsky in New York'', opera (1980)
- Three guitar quartets, No. 1 in homage to Ravel (1986-1989)
- '' The Brides Of Enderby '', song cycle (1977)
- 'Music for Hiroshima ', for double string orchestra (1945)
- Suite For Orchestra Of Malays, Chinese And Indians (1956)
- Andrew Biswell , a lecturer in the English department of Manchester Metropolitan University (until 1992 known as Manchester Polytechnic), is the author of '' The Real Life Of Anthony Burgess ''. Dubbed "Biswell's Life of Burgess" and semi-authorised by Burgess's widow, the biography was published in 2005.
- Michael Ratcliffe wrote the entry on Burgess for the ''New Dictionary of National Biography'' (2004).
- '', a blend of vilification and affectionate tribute, was published in 2002.
- Richard Mathews, ''The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess'' (Borgo Press, 1990)
- Martine Ghosh-Schellhorn , ''Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character'' (Peter Lang AG, 1986)
- Geoffrey Aggeler, ''Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist'' (Alabama, 1979)
- Samuel Coale, ''Anthony Burgess'' (New York, 1981)
- A.A. Devitis , ''Anthony Burgess'' (New York, 1972)
- Jerome Gold, ''The Prisoner's Son: Homage to Anthony Burgess'' (Black Heron Press 1996)
- Robert K. Morris, ''The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess'' (Missouri, 1971)
- Carol M. Dix , ''Anthony Burgess'' (British Council, 1971)
- Paul Phillips, ''A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess'' (due for publication mid-2006 by Manchester University Press).
A few of the memoirs and other books in which Burgess is discussed:
- 'Playboy Interview: Anthony Burgess', '' Playboy '', September 1974
- Valerie Grove , 'This Old Man Comes Ranting Home', '' The Times '', March 6 1992
- Jim Hicks, 'Eclectic Author Of His Own Five-Foot Shelf', ''Life'', October 25 1968
- Anthony Lewis , 'I Love England, But I Will No Longer Live There', ''New York Times Magazine'', November 3 1968
- Richard Heller, 'Burgess The Betrayer', London ''Mail on Sunday'', April 11 1993
- Edward Pearce , 'Let Us Now Honour a Wordsmith of Unearthly Powers', '' Sunday Times '', July 31 1988
- Michael Barber, 'Getting Up English Noses: Burgess at Seventy', ''Books'', April 1987
- Chris Burkham, 'Lust for Language', ''The Face'', April 1984
- Anthony Clare , 'Unearthly Powers', ''Listener'', July 28 1988
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