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“... and globules of pure fact rise to the surface, the dishomogeneity annoys. Some reviewers of Anthony Burgess’s new novel say it has curdled: ‘so let’s say he does know all Walton’s percussion parts by heart, and has the Hebrew or the Russian word for almost anything, is he able to use them to tell a better story?’ I think he is. In Any Old ...”

“... Triangle. ‘Does anyone, other than Mr John Braine, read John O’Hara these days?’ asks Anthony Burgess in the Observer, without staying for an answer. Well, I guess someone does, even here, since Panther Books, not famous for reckless commercial ventures motivated exclusively by nostalgia, reprinted his six best (and biggest) novels last ...”

“... Motion imagines the least imaginative route Keats, had he lived, could have taken: usefulness. Anthony Burgess suggested a wittier alternative in his fictional account of Keats’s last days, Abba Abba (1977), which posited a poet turning from archaic lushness to colloquial bawdiness: an idea cleverly founded on a non-canonical side of Keats – his ...”

“... is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph, as such peers as Anthony Powell or Iris Murdoch. Fans such as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess praise Ballard to the skies but they themselves are classified differently, as, God help us, “serious writers” in comparison.’ She won ...”

“... restaurateurs. ‘You aul whore you, you can’t write,’ he informs her, reminding her ‘of how Anthony Burgess had slated me, had said that after Joyce and Yeats and Co, after the giants, came “the little people”, such as me’. Sean Kenny, the silent theatre designer, another compatriot, might have challenged him, but was now gone, having ...”

“... Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was ...”

“... innocence, an instinctive respect for individuality. Post-war events have certainly seen that off. Anthony Burgess remembered in his review of the Larkin biography attending a fancy-dress party in 1941 dressed as an SS officer. Nobody took much notice. Today it would seem a vicious provocation or an act of tasteless bravado. Humour and ridicule, antidote ...”

“... and easily stop you getting on with whatever it is you are supposed to be doing if you are not Anthony Burgess. About as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming ...”

“... and his brilliant book The Speakers attracted the admiration of Harold Pinter, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Pritchett and more, he has gradually achieved the status of super-wizard in a community of nomads, pilgrims and seekers after truth. For two years he successfully ran the Ruff, Tuff, Cream Puff Estate Agency (founded by Wat Tyler in ...”

“... had to be good’. But ‘good’ isn’t good enough as a category.) Last year’s promotion of Anthony Burgess to official Grand Old Man was a case in point. After years of getting respectful, rather than ecstatic reviews, and of writing the sort of books which perhaps aren’t naturally suited to the British book-reader, ...”

“... writing a novel, and there are walk-on parts for such fellow novelists as Alberto Moravia, Anthony Burgess (who appears under his own name) and the clumsily veiled author of The Hormones of the New Eve, ‘Angela Lobster’. Will, an American journalist on intimate terms with the French intelligentsia, is supposedly writing his novel during a ...”

“... perfectly smooth improvisation.It emerged that everybody loves the OED, not always as devotedly as Anthony Burgess, who was absent but often mentioned, but with a decent fervour all the same. Certainly all the speakers loved it, not least Daniel Boorstin, ex-Librarian of Congress, who came right out with it, in so many words. Could they have felt this way ...”

“... respect. Anyone who has read my other books will know that I do not even aim at realism.’ But Anthony Burgess, in his interesting new foreword, holds that The Aerodrome ‘functions, in spite of the author’s disclaimer, as a realistic work with larger overtones’. When I first read this symbolic novel, thirty years ago, it seemed almost ...”

“... not concentrating his energies on the pursuit of clues. There is more open use of autobiography in Anthony Burgess’s The Pianoplayers. He has told us before (in This Man and Music) the grim story of his infancy in 1918 Manchester. His father came home on leave from the Pay Corps, found his wife and daughter dead from Spanish flu and his baby son the ...”

“... I bought my first cookery book in 1960, as part of my trousseau. It was called Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, a Penguin paperback with a seductive pink jacket depicting a large family at table – evidently not a British family, for its members, shirt-sleeved, aproned, some of them children, were uncorking bottles, slicing bread, eagerly tucking their napkins under their chins, faces aglow with the certain knowledge their dinners would not disappoint, which was, in those days, extremely rare in this country ...”