Earthly Powers
 Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. It begins with the outrageously provocative first sentence: It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.On one level it is a parody of a blockbuster novel with the 81-year-old hero Kenneth Toomey (allegedly loosely based on British author W.