At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duo-decimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 1605 was 'the olden days', meaning Henry VIII, the executioner's axe, and the Great Plague. She thrust the book into the kitchen fire with the tongs, yelling that it must be seething with lethal germs. A limited, though live, sense of history. And history was the reason why she would never go to London. She saw it as dominated by the Bloody Tower, Fleet Street full of demon barbers, as well as dangerous escalators everywhere.

In early 1958 The Enemy in the Blanket appeared and at once provoked a libel suit. Though completed in 1958 the work was not publiAnthony Burgessd until 1961 for what it was worth it was made a choice of the book society. The novel which drew on Edgar I.

From relatively modest beginnings in a Manchester Catholic family in the North of England he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer the dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best known novel. He composed over 250 musical works including a first symphony around age 18 wrote a number of libretti and translated among other works Cyrano de Bergerac Oedipus the King and Carmen.