Word: burgess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Britain sex is lethal, while it seems that spying, though regrettable, can be lived with. A series of sensational double agents at high levels of British intelligence, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, never seriously rocked the British ship of state. But sex scandals have regularly felled British political figures, from War Secretary John Profumo in 1963 to Conservative Party Deputy Chairman Jeffrey Archer last year...
During the past three decades, Author Anthony Burgess has produced a truly stupendous volume of writing. The number of his novels now approaches 30. There have also been more than 20 other books, including nonfiction, literary criticism, biography, children's stories, poems, plays and translations, not to mention screenplays and a relentless stream of uncollected reviews and journalistic pieces. This frenzy of production has made the author famous and, paradoxically, a tad unwelcome. Readers and reviewers, confronted regularly with someone who makes himself impossible to ignore, are likely to decide to do just that. A new Burgess? Never mind...
Probably so. But skipping The Pianoplayers is not a good idea. Burgess, 69, has recaptured the same linguistic verve and inventiveness that marked his earlier fiction, especially The Doctor Is Sick (1960) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). He has also created a heroine to rival, in nearly every respect, the comically seedy poet Enderby, hero of four Burgess novels. Ellen Henshaw is an old woman living in the south of France when she decides to set down her memoirs, with the stenographic assistance of one Rolf Marcus, an itinerant and blocked American journalist who needs the lodgings that...
That she does, later, as a lady of pleasure, madam and finally founder of an international chain of Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim...
...18th century stronghold on Lake Ontario. The conflict usually re-enacted is the siege of Fort Niagara, won by the British in 1759. But, one Saturday not long ago, the Siege of Oswego (1756) was refought, and the French and their Indian allies forced a British surrender. Afterward, Harry Burgess, 38, a Port Huron, Mich., history teacher, ranted to an onlooker in French-accented English about "thees monster," the British army. Reverting to normal English, Burgess said that partaking in such battles "gives us a private time machine...