Episodios
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In this episode, Andrew Biswell explores Anthony Burgess’s new collection of essays on music, The Devil Prefers Mozart, with editor Paul Phillips.
The Devil Prefers Mozart is the first collection of Anthony Burgess’s essays on music and musicians. This wide-ranging anthology covers classical, modern and operatic works, as well as jazz, pop, heavy metal and punk. This episode of the podcast discusses the versatility of Burgess’s writing on music, the different sorts of essays in the new collection and what Burgess really thought of the work of the Beatles.
Paul Phillips is the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University, and author A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, the definitive study of Burgess’s music and its relationship to his writing. Paul has contributed essays to six books on Burgess, including the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange, and is an Honorary Patron of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and its Music Advisor.
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LINKS
The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians by Anthony Burgess, edited by Paul Phillips at Carcanet
The Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess by Paul Phillips (affiliate link)
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Anthony Burgess News, our free weekly Substack newsletter.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to writer and publisher Richard Cohen about his memories of working with Anthony Burgess in the 1980s.
Richard Cohen is the former publishing director of Hutchinson, and was instrumental in publishing some of Burgess’s best known novels of the 1980s, beginning with The Pianoplayers in 1986. After working at Hutchinson, Richard moved to Hodder, and eventually set up his own company Richard Cohen Books. During his time in publishing he worked with authors as varied as Jeffrey Archer, John Le Carre, Kingsley Amis, Fay Wheldon. Sebastian Faulks, and Rudy Giuliani.
As a writer, Richard has published four books of non-fiction: By the Sword, a history of swordplay; Chasing the Sun, an epic history of the Sun; How to Write Like Tolstoy, a guide for writers; and Making History, a history of historians from Herodotus to the present day.
Richard was also an Olympic fencer, competing in Munich, Montreal and Los Angeles between 1972 and 1984. He won both a gold and bronze medal for fencing at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.
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LINKS
Making History: Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)
By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)
Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)
How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Subscribe to the Burgess Foundation's free newsletter for weekly news, event listings and writing by and about Anthony Burgess.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode, Andrew Biswell exploring the making of the new documentary film, A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy, with the directors Elisa Mantin and Benoit Felici.
A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy, is the first new documentary to focus on Burgess for 25 years. Drawing on archive footage, startling new animations, and interviews with major cultural figures such as Will Self and Ai Weiwei, this documentary reconsiders the 60-year history of A Clockwork Orange as a novel, film, stage play and cultural influence.
LINKS:
To watch the French version, Orange méchanique: les rouages de la violence, click here.
To watch the German version, Clockwork Orange: Im Räderwerk der Gewalt, click here.
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Sign up to our free newsletter
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In this episode, we hand the microphone over to Anthony Burgess himself, as he gives a special festive reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our listeners! We'll be back in 2024 with more podcasts.
For more information about Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation, visit our website.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode, we’re exploring a parallel universe Glasgow as we talk about Alasdair Gray’s Lanark with writer and biographer Rodge Glass.
Lanark is a strange, experimental book that immediately thrusts the reader into a weird world with glimmers of familiarity. It’s a novel with two stories, that weave around each other but don’t quite come together in an obvious way. It begins with the story of a man called Lanark, whose lonely existence in the city of Unthank is eventually disturbed when his skin begins to grow dragon scales. This story is interrupted by that of Duncan Thaw, who remembers his journey to become an artist, studying at the Glasgow School of Art and struggling to get by painting murals around the city. What, if anything, is the connection between Thaw and Lanark?
Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie, Glasgow in 1934. He began studying at the Glasgow School of Art in 1953, where he started writing Lanark. He graduated in 1957 and painted murals around Glasgow. Many of his murals have been lost, but some can still be seen around the city. Most famously, his mural at the Òran Mór theatre is the largest public artwork in Scotland. Alongside his career as an artist he wrote nine novels, five collections of short stories, and several works for the theatre. He died in 2019.
Rodge Glass is the author of seven published books across fiction, the graphic novel, the short story and nonfiction, including Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, which won a Somerset Maugham Award for Nonfiction, and his new book Michel Faber: The Writer & his Work, published by Liverpool University Press in August 2023. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and was the Convener of the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference hosted in Glasgow in 2022. He works closely with the Alasdair Gray Archive on creative commissions, academic work and on building Gray's legacy internationally.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Alasdair Gray:
'The Star' in Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
1982, Janine (1984)
The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985)
Poor Things (1992)
A Life in Pictures (2009)
By others:
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
'The Crystal Egg' in The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories by HG Wells (1897)
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)
Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography by Rodge Glass (2009)
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LINKS
Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography by Rodge Glass (affiliate link)
Michel Faber: The Writer & His Work by Rodge Glass (affiliate link)
The Alasdair Gray Archive
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.
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If you’ve enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe and review wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, Graham Foster explores pre-civil rights America in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, with writer and academic Sterling L. Bland Jr.
Invisible Man follows a nameless black narrator, from his early life as a student of an all-black college based on the Tuskegee Institute, through his expulsion and move to New York where he takes up a series of low status jobs before he falls in with a radical political group called The Brotherhood and takes part in a race riot in Harlem. The novel is part bildungsroman, part satire, and full of literary allusion, allegory and rich imagery. It’s also an impassioned commentary on the black experience in an America marked by segregation, inequality and racism.
Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1914. He discovered the power of literature at the Tuskegee Institute, even though he left before graduating. In 1936, he moved to New York, meeting writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Invisible Man was the only novel published in his lifetime, though he also published two volumes of essays. Since his death in 1994, his second, unfinished, novel was published in 1999 under the title Juneteenth. A longer version of this novel was published in 2010 under the title Three Days Before the Shooting… There have also been two further volumes of essays, a collection of short stories, and two selections of his letters.
Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr. is a professor in the departments of English, Africana Studies, and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation and Understanding Nineteenth Century Slave Narratives. He has written extensively about Ralph Ellison and contributed essays to books such as Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison, and Ralph Ellison in Context. His most recent book is In the Shadow of Invisibility: Ralph Ellison and the Promise of American Democracy.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Ralph Ellison:
Shadow and Act: Essays (1964)
Going to the Territory: Essays (1986)
Juneteenth (1999), also published in a longer form as Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010)
By others:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
Light in August by William Faulkner (1932)
Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
The Mansion by William Faulkner (1959)
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead (1999)
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LINKS
In the Shadow of Invisibility: Ralph Ellison and the Promise of American Democracy by Sterling L. Bland Jr. (affiliate link)
Ralph Ellison Foundation
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, Will Carr explores the world of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time with writer and academic Nicholas Birns.
A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume roman-fleuve following fifty years in the life of the narrator Nick Jenkins from his schooldays in the 1920s through the Second World War to his later years at the beginning of the 1970s.
Anthony Powell was born in Westminster, London in 1905. As well as the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, he wrote seven further novels, four volumes of memoir, several plays and various works of non-fiction. He died in 2000, aged 94.
Nicholas Birns is on the faculty of New York University, where he teaches contemporary world literature in English. His most recent book is The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel which he co-edited with Louis Klee. His first book Understanding Anthony Powell appeared in 2004 and he is a founding member of the Anthony Powell Society.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867)
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (1906-21)
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (1913-27)
Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930)
The Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess (1956-9)
Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame (1957)
Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White (1961)
Alms for Oblivion by Simon Raven (1964-76)
The Novel Now by Anthony Burgess (1967)
The Novels of Anthony Powell by Robert K Morris (1968)
Invitation to Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling (1977)
The Novels of Anthony Powell by James Tucker (1977)
The Harpur and Iles Series by Bill James (1985-2019)
The Lampitt Chronicles by A.N. Wilson (1988-96)
The Night Soldiers Series by Alan Furst (1988-2019)
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (2006)
Dance Class: American High-School Students Encounter Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time compiled by John A Gould (2009)
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LINKS
Understanding Anthony Powell by Nicholas Birns
Nicholas Birns on Twitter and Instagram
The Anthony Powell Society
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, Graham Foster assesses the dystopian threats of Rex Warner's 1942 novel The Aerodrome. Writer and academic Joseph Darlington guides us through Warner’s politics, his representations of England and whether or not the novel is truly a dystopia.
The Aerodrome is set in a nameless but idyllic rural village, where the inhabitants live rough but blameless lives attending church, frequenting the pub and enjoying village fetes. But on a hill overlooking the village, a mysterious militaristic aerodrome has been constructed, and threatens to overwhelm the entire countryside. Our hero Roy, disillusioned with village life, attempts to resist the lure of the Air-Vice Marshall, a charismatic leader who promises order and excitement.
Rex Warner was born in Birmingham in 1905, and was a renowned classicist, writer, poet and translator. He attended Wadham College, Oxford, where he became friends with W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. During the 1930s he developed strong anti-fascist beliefs, something reflected in his first three novels: The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor, and The Aerodrome. He wrote seven further novels, three books of poetry, and many volumes of non-fiction including translations from Ancient Greek and Latin. His translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War for Penguin Classics sold over a million copies, and is still in print today. He died in 1973.
Joseph Darlington is the author of The Experimentalists, published by Bloomsbury, a collective biography of British experimental novelists of the 1960s. He is also the author of the novel The Girl Beneath the Ice, published by Northodox, and the co-editor of the Manchester Review of Books.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Rex Warner:
The Wild Goose Chase (1937)
The Professor (1938)
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (translation, 1954)
By others;
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790)
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1886)
The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
Quack! Quack! by Leonard Woolf (1935)
Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin (1937)
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
1985 by Anthony Burgess (1978)
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
The Mushroom Jungle: A History of Postwar Paperback Publishing by Steve Holland (1993)
The Mortmere Stories by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward (1994)
The Wall by John Lanchester (2019)
The Death of H.L. Hix by H.L. Hix (2021)
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LINKS
The Experimentalists by Joseph Darlington at Bloomsbury
Joseph Darlington on Twitter
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, we’re discussing the bawdy, gluttonous and flatulent Falstaff by Robert Nye, with writer and academic, Rob Spence.
Falstaff is a masterpiece of obscene excess. Telling the story of the medieval knight Sir John Fastolf, reportedly the model for Shakespeare’s famous rake Falstaff, Nye’s novel is split into 100 chapters, and goes from Fastolf’s conception on the penis of the Cerne Abbas Giant to his death at the age of 81. It’s a novel Burgess calls Rabelaisian, saying it is a ‘bold venture and an indication of what the novel can do when it frees itself from the constraints of the Jamesian tradition.’
Robert Nye was an award-winning poet, novelist and critic, whose work was often inspired by his deep knowledge and love of literature. As a novelist, his work includes novels about Merlin, Faust, Lord Byron, and the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais. Born in London, he settled in Cork, Ireland, where he died in 2016.
Rob Spence is a retired academic. He has published on a range of modern and contemporary authors, including Anthony Burgess, Robert Nye, Ford Madox Ford, Louis de Bernieres, Wyndham Lewis and Penelope Fitzgerald.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Robert Nye:
Beowulf: A New Telling (1968)
Merlin (1978)
Faust (1980)
The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989)
The Life and Death of My Lord Gilles de Rais (1990)
By others:
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (c. 1592)
Henry IV (Parts One and Two) by William Shakespeare (c. 1597-99)
Henry V by William Shakespeare (c. 1599)
The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1602)
The Tempest by William Shakespeare (c. 1610)
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (1941)
The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis (1948)
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960)
Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess (1964)
Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction, ed. by Giles Gordon (1975)
A Long Trip to Tea Time by Anthony Burgess (1976)
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess (1993)
Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (1997)
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LINKS
Rob Spence Online
Guardian obituary of Robert Nye
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.
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If you’ve enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, Andrew Biswell explores Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. Guiding him through the novel is Isherwood's authorised biographer and editor of his letters and diaries, Katherine Bucknell.
A Single Man tells the story of George, an English professor living in suburban Los Angeles and grieving the death of his lover, Jim. Set over one day, the novel is a deeply moving study of grief and a sensitive portrait of the aftermath of a committed gay relationship, published at a time when notions such as same-sex marriage were controversial and prohibited by law.
Christopher Isherwood was born near Stockport, England, in 1904. In 1929, he travelled to Berlin with W.H. Auden, which provided material for a sequence of novels, most notably Goodbye to Berlin, which was the basis for the hit musical Cabaret. Isherwood emigrated to the United States in 1939, first to New York with Auden, and then to California. In 1953, he met Don Bachardy and they formed a lifelong relationship. Isherwood died in 1986.
Katherine Bucknell is a biographer, editor and novelist. She has edited three volumes of Isherwood’s diaries, and The Animals, a volume of letters between Isherwood and Bachardy, which is also the basis of a podcast hosted by Katherine. Her novels include Leninsky Prospekt, Canarino, What You Will, and +1. She is the founder of the W.H. Auden Society and the director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She is currently working on a major new biography of Christopher Isherwood.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Christopher Isherwood:
Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
Prater Violet (1945)
Down There on a Visit (1962)
A Meeting by the River (1967)
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
By others:
Bhagavad Vita (c. 200 BCE)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1879-80)
Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy (1911)
Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham (1944)
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LINKS
Christopher Isherwood: Diaries, Volume One: 1939-1960 (edited by Katherine Bucknell) at Blackwells (affiliate link)
The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (edited by Katherine Bucknell) at Blackwells (affiliate link)
Katherine Bucknell's Website
The Christopher Isherwood Foundation
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, we’re donning our snap-brim fedoras and trench-coats to investigate The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler with our special guest biographer Tom Williams.
The Long Good-bye is Raymond Chandler’s sixth novel, and features the further adventures of his most famous creation, private detective Philip Marlowe. After being contacted by his friend, Terry Lennox, Marlowe finds himself embroiled in the aftermath of the murder of Lennox’s wife, Sylvia. Seemingly an open-and-shut case, the mystery surrounding her death grows, and Marlowe traverses Los Angeles in search of answers from a range of oddballs and criminals.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and grew up in Ireland and London. He worked as a civil servant and a journalist in London. In 1912 he returned to America. He introduced the world to Philip Marlowe in his 1939 novel The Big Sleep, and six further novels. He died in 1959.
Tom Williams is a biographer and writer. He was born in Newcastle and read English at University College in London. He has worked in publishing and publishing technology and, in 2012, wrote A Mysterious Something in the Light: A Biography of Raymond Chandler. He currently lives in Washington DC.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Raymond Chandler:
The Big Sleep (1939)
Farewell My Lovely (1940)
Playback (1958)
Poodle Springs (with Robert B. Parker, 1989)
Philip Marlowe Novels:
The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black/John Banville (2014)
Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne (2018)
The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide (2022)
By others:
The Perry Mason Series by Erle Stanley Gardner (1933-73)
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1949)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
Collected Poems by TS Elliot (1963)
Cocksure by Mordecai Richler (1968)
Bomber by Len Deighton (1970)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
The Inspector Rebus Series by Ian Rankin (1987-2022)
Black and Blue by Ian Rankin (1997)
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black/John Banville (2006)
The Slough House/Jackson Lamb Series by Mick Herron (2010-22)
The Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling (2013-22)
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LINKS
A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler, A Life by Tom Williams (affiliate link)
Tom Williams on Twitter and Instagram
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, Graham Foster discovers Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, with poet, translator, editor and literary titan, Michael Schmidt.
Under the Volcano traces Geoffrey Firmin’s last day. It's set on the Day of the Dead festival in 1938, during which Firmin is visited by his wife and his brother, who offer the possibility of salvation from his alcoholic decline. As the trio spend the day together, their uneasy alliance is threatened by Firmin’s drinking, his suspicions, and his desire to vanish into the Mexican countryside. As events unfold it quickly becomes apparent that Firmin has no interest in saving himself.
Malcolm Lowry was born on the Wirral in 1909. At eighteen, he left home to work at sea, which inspired his novel Ultramarine (1933). After gaining a degree from Cambridge and after the breakdown of his first marriage, he crossed the Atlantic and explored the United States, Mexico and Canada. He died in 1957.
Michael Schmidt is a poet, literary historian, translator and editor. His most recent book of poems, Talking to Stanley on the Telephone, appeared in 2021. His major critical undertakings include Lives of the Poets (1999), The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek poets (2005), The Novel: a Biography (2014) and Gilgamesh: the Life of a Poem (2019). Michael is founder, editor, and managing director of Carcanet Press and general editor of PN Review. He is currently a Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Malcolm Lowry:
Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (1962)
By others:
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (c. 1321)
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan (1606)
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (trans. by Thomas Urquhart, 1653)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
Three Lives by Gertrude Stein (1909)
'The Dead' in Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)
Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence (1926)
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940)
Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg (1963)
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LINKS
Talking to Stanley on the Telephone by Michael Schmidt (affiliate link)
The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt (affiliate link)
Carcanet Press
PN Review
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.
In this episode, Andrew Biswell heads back to the era of the Bright Young Things to examine Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with writer, academic and editor Barbara Cooke.
Brideshead Revisited is perhaps Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel. It follows Ryder as he remembers his life, from his undergraduate years at the University of Oxford in the golden age before the Second World War, to his wartime enlistment in the army. His life is coloured by his obsession with the Flytes, an aristocratic Catholic family who live in the stately home of Brideshead. In Ninety-Nine Novels, Burgess writes, ‘I have read Brideshead Revisited at least a dozen times and have never failed to be charmed and moved, even to tears.’
Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903. At the age of 24, he published his first book, a biography of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the following year he published his first novel, Decline and Fall. Sixteen more novels followed, including A Handful of Dust, Scoop and Vile Bodies. His last novels were the Sword of Honour trilogy, which were published in 1965. He died in 1966.
Barbara Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is also Co-Executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, published by Oxford University Press, a series which brings together all of Waugh’s published and previously unpublished writing with comprehensive introductions, contextual writing and annotations. She is the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford, published by The Bodleian Library, and has recently written the introduction to Penguin’s new edition of Decline and Fall.
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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
By Evelyn Waugh:
Decline and Fall (1928)
Vile Bodies (1930)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Helena (1950)
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
A Little Learning (1957)
By others:
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (1935)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
Crooked House by Agatha Christie (1949)
A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1967)
Ruling Passions by Tom Driberg (1977)
Evelyn Waugh (Two Volumes: The Early Years 1903-1939 and The Later Years 1939-1966) by Martin Stannard (1989-94)
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LINKS
Evelyn Waugh's Oxford by Barbara Cooke (affiliate link)
The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford University Press
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.
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If you’ve enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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In this episode, Graham Foster talks to one of the 2023 Liana Burgess Fellows, Dr Mária Palla, who has spent three weeks researching in the archives at the Burgess Foundation.
In its capacity as an educational charity, the Burgess Foundation offers grants to researchers and scholars with an interest in the life and work of Anthony Burgess and other connected subjects such as twentieth century literature and musical composition. The Liana Burgess Fellowship helps international researchers to visit the archives at the Burgess Foundation. It is named after Burgess’s wife, who set up the Foundation in 2003 and was instrumental in preserving his personal papers and possessions, all of which is available to researchers at our facilities in Manchester.
Dr Mária Palla is an assistant professor in the Institute of English and America Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary. Her research focuses on contemporary literatures in English, which she examines using the tools of post-colonial criticism. She has published widely on Canadian literature, focussing on representations of the diasporic experiences of immigrants to the country. She is currently working on Anthony Burgess’s Malayan novels.
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LINKS:
Mária Palla at Pázmány Péter Catholic University
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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In this episode, Graham Foster to one of the 2023 Liana Burgess Fellows, Dr Ákos Farkas, who has spent three weeks researching in the archives at the Burgess Foundation.
In its capacity as an educational charity, the Burgess Foundation offers grants to researchers and scholars with an interest in the life and work of Anthony Burgess and other connected subjects such as twentieth century literature and musical composition. The Liana Burgess Fellowship helps international researchers to visit the archives at the Burgess Foundation. It is named after Burgess’s wife, who set up the Foundation in 2003 and was instrumental in preserving his personal papers and possessions, all of which is available to researchers at our facilities in Manchester.
Dr Ákos Farkas is Associate Professor of English at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. His research interests lie in twentieth century English, American and Irish literature, in particular, the Catholic novel, modernism and the postmodern and utopian and dystopian literature. As a translator and editor, he has helped bring Burgess’s Enderby sequence into Hungarian, and has translated the works of authors such as Cecilia Ahern, Geroge McDonald Fraser, Tibor Fischer and George Orwell. He is also the volume editor for the Irwell Edition of Anthony Burgess’s The Clockwork Testament, available now from Manchester University Press.
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LINKS:
Ákos Farkas at Eötvös Loránd University
The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess at Manchester University Press
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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In this episode, Andrew Biswell explores Anthony Burgess’s adventures in America with the help of Christopher W. Thurley.
Burgess first visited America in 1966, when he was 49, but over the course of his career he gained extensive experience of both living and working in the United States. These experiences influenced some of his most important work, including Earthly Powers, and he analysed American culture extensively in his journalism and non-fiction.
Christopher W Thurley is an English faculty member at Gaston College in Dallas, North Carolina. He earned his doctorate, which focussed on the life and work of Anthony Burgess, from Manchester Metropolitan University. His monograph, Anthony Burgess and America, is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.
Click here for more information about Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation.
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In this episode, Andrew Biswell, Director of the Burgess Foundation, investigates Anthony Burgess's Chatsky, to celebrate the very first publication of the play by Salamander Street. Chatsky is translated from Alexander Griboyedov's nineteenth century play Gore ot uma, or Woe Out of Wit.
Chatsky tells the story of a young Russian diplomat who returns from a foreign posting to Moscow, where he hopes to rekindle his love affair with his childhood sweetheart ,Sophie, but she is being pursued by Molchalin, and the Moscow elite have grown suspicious of Chatsky's worldly intelligence. Burgess's exuberant translation maintains the original's rhyming form, but, like his earlier translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, the wordy and witty results are quintessentially Burgessian.
To shed light on the play, Andrew Biswell speaks to Anna Aslanyan, expert in Russian literature, about Griboyedov's original, and how Burgess's translation captures its essence. He also chats to Jonathan Cullen, who played Molchalin in the original production of Chatsky at the Almeida, London, in March 1993. Here's more about our guests in this episode:
Anna Aslanyan is a journalist, translator and public service interpreter. As a journalist she has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and other UK publications, writing about books and arts. Her translations from Russian include contemporary short stories for Dalkey Archive’s collection Best European Fiction and Egor Kovalevsky’s 19th century travelogue A Journey to Africa. Her popular history of translation Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History is out now.
Jonathan Cullen has been an actor for stage and screen for nearly 40 years. On stage, he has performed lead roles with the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and on the West End as well as renowned theatres around the UK. He has appeared in films such as Velvet Goldmine, Finding Neverland and Suffragette, and on television he played King George VI in the BBC’s adaptation of Len Deighton’s SS-GB, and the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Channel 4 comedy The Windsors. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon.
Extracts from Chatsky are read by Paul Barnhill who is an actor, puppeteer and the creative director of the theatre company Goofus.
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LINKS
Two Plays: Chatsky and Miser, Miser by Anthony Burgess at Salamander Street
Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan at Blackwells (affiliate link)
Jonathan Cullen's Website
Goofus Theatre Company
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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Andrew Biswell speaks to writer and journalist Andy Spinoza about his new book, Manchester Unspun, a post-industrial cultural history of Anthony Burgess's hometown.
Andy Spinoza moved from London to Manchester at the age of eighteen and has remained in the city ever since. He wrote about the city’s music scene for the NME and The Face and he founded the alternative magazine City Life in 1983, which charted the city’s cultural life for over twenty years, and helped launch the careers of Mark Kermode, Jon Ronson and Melvin Burgess among others. Andy also worked as a gossip columnist for Manchester Evening News for ten years, during which time he met Anthony Burgess several times.
LINKS:
Manchester Unspun by Andy Spinoza at Manchester University Press
Andy Spinoza on Twitter
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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Anthony Burgess was one of the most important and prolific British writers of the twentieth century. Most famous for his dystopian vision A Clockwork Orange, he wrote 33 novels, 25 books of non-fiction and over 250 musical compositions. This podcast aims to illuminate Burgess’s life and work, and his connections to other twentieth century literature, film and music. So join us as we explore the world of Anthony Burgess.
In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to the poet Peter Bakowski about his virtual residency at the Burgess Foundation and the poems inspired by his research into Anthony Burgess.
Peter Bakowski is our first Virtual Writer in Residence and joined us through a collaborative project with Manchester UNESCO City of Literature. Peter is an award-winning Australian poet, whose work has an international influence. Having travelled widely in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia, his work has been set in many countries around the world, and been published in languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Bengali and Mandarin. 2022 marks his 40th year of writing poetry.
Peter’s latest collection of poetry are Our Ways on Earth, published by Recent Work Press, and Nearly Lunch, published by Wakefield Press and written in collaboration with the Adelaide poet Ken Bolton.
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LINKS:
Our Ways on Earth by Peter Bakowski
Nearly Lunch by Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton
Manchester UNESCO City of Literature
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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In this episode, Will Carr celebrates the release of the Irwell Edition of Anthony Burgess's Mozart and the Wolf Gang with Christine Lee Gengaro, Professor of Music at Los Angeles City College.
The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess is one of the central projects of the Burgess Foundation, and aims to publish each of Burgess’s novels and major works of non-fiction in critical editions edited by experts and scholars. Each edition has a new introduction, a text which has been restored to that of the first edition, appendices drawn from the Burgess Archives around the world, and expansive notes on the text. Mozart and the Wolf Gang is a strange novella. It was written to commemorate the bicentenary of Mozart, and combines fiction, opera libretto, and fragments of film script among other things which work together to be a deliberation on the nature of music.
The Irwell Edition of Mozart and the Wolf Gang was edited by Alan Shockley, and was one of his final projects before he died in 2020. Alan was Professor of Music at California State University, Long Beach, and as a composer, he thoughtful and challenging work was admired by audiences all over the world.
Mozart and the Wolf Gang is out now!
Find out more about the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess at Manchester University Press.
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LINKS:
A Memorial for Alan Shockley at California State University, Long Beach
Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth Century Novel by Alan Shockley
Gender, Power and Identity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick [containing 'Music and Misogyny in A Clockwork Orange' by Christine Lee Gengaro]
Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange [containing 'Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel, Film, and Play, A Clockwork Orange' by Christine Lee Gengaro]
International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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