Anthony Burgess

The delirious kaleidoscope of a book is the culmination and distillation of twenty years' work on Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), the author who remains best known for A Clockwork Orange, the source for Stanley Kubrick's classic film. Yet Burgess was the author of over sixty books, ranging from airport blockbusters to a history of the stagecoach from brilliant studies of Joyce, Shakespeare, Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence, to meditations on music and pot-boilers on beds and pornography. When he died, he left approximately $3 million in the bank and ten or so houses or apartments scattered across Europe.

Burgess, Roger Lewis argues, was the writer as faker and prankster who lived, like an actor, by deception and illusion. Tracking his quarry from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Lewis assesses Burgess's struggles and grudges, and uncovers the webs of truth and lies.