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“... them. He steals ‘Heinemann firsts of Enderby Outside, Tremor of Intent and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman, Cape 1939, buckram bound. A cased Cassell edition of The Father Brown Stories ... Black Mischief, another old Chapman & Hall first, no dj, but handsome mottled brown boards.’ We may choose to believe ...”

“... writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family – ...”

“... you how much Cyril Connolly was paid for a weekly newspaper article in the 1960s, or for how much Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing chunks of information. We learn that Harold Monro, who established the Poetry Bookshop shortly before the First World War, was a twice-married homosexual of ...”

“... for the sheer mischief of it, while others use anonymity as a perverse way of provoking curiosity. Anthony Trollope resorted to anonymity because he wrote too fast and was sensitive to charges of overproduction. Anthony Burgess went anonymous for a while for much the same reason. He was also the undeclared reviewer of ...”

“... some hotel.’ It takes me a time to realise that she is not talking about her treasured copies of Anthony Burgess but her social security books.12 March. Names of the Albanian Football Team.The Interpreter: Ilir Agolli.The Manager: Shyqri Rrelli.The Goalkeeper: Blendi Nallbani.2 April. Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary on Klaus ...”

“... in a while a reviewer will complain about the price of books – isn’t it Philistine? Recently Anthony Burgess whined about his own prices. If he had done the sums he would have learnt they have only risen with inflation. He should think, not how much, they cost, but how much they are worth. £ 13.95 I think it was. I haven’t had time to write about ...”

“... ends up producing a fable very much in their own image.In​ June 1961, the Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess and his first wife, Lynne, took a holiday in the USSR. In Cold War Leningrad there were echoes for Burgess of his backstreet Manchester childhood. The music of accents: voices that were exotic yet strangely ...”

“... success of Fortunes of War, the 1987 TV version of her two trilogies set in the Second World War (Anthony Burgess, a fan, called them a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her ...”

“... that Dylan can’t sing, or play the harmonica, or write good English, and anyway, according to Anthony Burgess, ‘he can’t compare as a poet with, say, people like Philip Larkin or even Adrian Mitchell.’ I know I ought to argue with these people. I know I ought to explain, patiently, that Dylan is the practitioner of an original art which does ...”

“... dystopianism. Certainly Sabbath’s Theatre and The Dying Animal display unflagging energy. Anthony Burgess reports somewhere a schoolmate’s recommendation to him of the plays of Shakespeare – ‘It’s all fighting and fucking tarts!’ – and the same might be said, with less enthusiasm, of Roth in extremis. These are not the kinds of thing ...”

“... work of many novelists who started publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode ...”

“... projected onto his own omnipresent person. His next two books, we are told, will be a biography of Anthony Burgess and ‘a slice of autobiography called Back to the Slaughterhouse’. I wonder if we shall be able to tell the ...”

“... coherence. It’s possibly true of, say, Philip Roth, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis, but Anthony Burgess? If you like A Clockwork Orange you’ll love Inside Mr Enderby? Or Margaret Atwood? If you like The Handmaid’s Tale you’ll love Alias Grace? With Banks, you knew what you were getting (and the excellent old Abacus black and white book ...”

“... as and when they occur. We saw this at work quite spectacularly in Roger Lewis’s biography of Anthony Burgess, in Geoff Dyer’s nicely solipsistic account of D.H. Lawrence, in Jonathan Coe’s artful enhancement of B.S. Johnson, and we see it here, in a more measured way. Perhaps our present conception of personality requires something more ...”

“... flat. Diana Vreeland called Johnson ‘a brisk, amusing, small woman ready for an argument’ and Anthony Burgess described her as ‘witty, satirical and deftly malicious’, which makes her sound like pure veneer. She seems to have toughened early, through and through. Her prose toughened early too. She can do many of the things that constitute good ...”