Word: burgesses
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...Anthony Burgess...
This eye-popping blurb -- about a dictionary, no less -- may seem a bit of a stretcher. But the Oxford English Dictionary is not just another reference book, an arcane preserve of scholars and authors, like Burgess, who use language to make their livings. Since its completion in 1928, exactly 71 years after it was proposed at a meeting of the Philological Society in London, the OED has stood as the ultimate authority on the tongue of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, not to mention the language of tradespeople and the slang of the streets. Relatively few speakers of English...
...Britain, Rushdie had no shortage of defenders. A group of writers led by playwright Harold Pinter presented a petition in Rushdie's behalf at No. 10 Downing Street. Author Anthony Burgess, writing in the newspaper the Independent, stated the Western position precisely: "What a secular society thinks of the Prophet Muhammad is its own affair, and reason, apart from law, does not permit aggressive interference of the kind that has brought shame and death to Islamabad," where the rioting took several lives. "If Muslims want to attack the Christian or humanistic vision of Islam contained in our literature," Burgess observed...
Mighty events pass quickly; 40 years of calamitous European history slide by as a diverting panorama. No character is on view long enough to be irksome, or for the reader to wonder unduly at arbitrary choices of personal traits and adventures assigned by the author. Burgess, as always, throws in bits of the many languages he knows, mostly untranslated. But where the invented Russian- English slang in Clockwork Orange had a brilliant sting to it (horrorshow from horosho, meaning good, and lewdies from lyudi, people), the phrases here in Russian and Latin appear, after a dash to the dictionary...
...sword does turn up, after some unlikelihoods normal to popular adventure. Perhaps it was Arthur's, but Burgess, who invented it, now seems to feel that it doesn't much matter. Both he and his characters discount Welsh nationalism as unserious playacting. One of his protagonists, in exasperation, chucks the sword into a pond, where it sinks without a deathbed speech. He explains, "I had to grasp a chunk of the romantic past and find it rusty." Which does not entirely answer a last-page question to the author: "What was that all about...