One man's chorus
Subtitle: the uncollected writings
By: Anthony Burgess ; selected with an introduction by Ben Forkner.
Contributors: Forkner, Ben.
Edition: 1st Carroll & Graf ed.
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 380
Description: A genuine master of the mot and the anecdote, Burgess rarely fails to amuse in this generous selection of essays on topics as various as oranges (not only of the clockwork variety), Marilyn Monroe, God, and Yiddish humor (his favorite one-liner, the Jewish matron's response to her son's psychiatrist: "Oedipus Schmoedipus - what's it matter so long as he loves his mother?").

In other of these candid and sometimes cantankerous pieces written over the past two decades Burgess revisits his youth in Manchester, reconsiders his experiences among British colonials in Malaysia, and reevaluates his literary exile in Monaco. He examines his craft, he carps at critics, he reflects upon literature and litterateurs, from such twentieth-century giants as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf to the eccentric Sitwells to fellow novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
Table of contents: title: The ball is free to roll; title: Francophonia; title: Going north; title: Understanding the French; title: Never again again; title: Something about Malaysia; title: The Brigg; title: Winterreise; title: The art of liking Rome; title: France and myself; title: Farewell (& hello again) Manchester; title: Life (of a sort) in Venice; title: Manchester as was; title: Cut off; title: The Royals; title: England in Europe; title: After this our exile; title: Thoughts on time; title: The Jew and the joke; title: The British temper; title: The world does't like Gipsies; title: What makes comedy comic?; title: Thoughts on the Thatcher decade; title: Dirty pictures; title: God and God's voices; title: Success; title: The Celtic sacrifice; title: Shaw as musician; title: Ring; title: The literature of the British from 1900 to 1982; title: All about Alice; title: Flann O'Brien, a prefactory word; title: Artist's life; title: Elgar non è volgare; title: The gaudiness of Gaudi; title: Orson Welles : the artist as bricoleur; title: A clockwork orange resucked; title: The brotherhood; title: Why were the Revolutionaries reactionary?; title: Shakespeare the poet; title: The oriental diseases of fiction; title: Playing Hamlet with Hamlet; title: Graham Greene : a reminiscence; title: Craft and crucifixion, the writing of fiction; title: Strega in do maggiore; title: First novel; title: Joyce as centenarian; title: Great Scott?; title: Rudyard Kipling and the white man's burden; title: Domesday; title: Lorenzo; title: Quiet pioneer; title: Good Gluck; title: Unravelling Ravel; title: God struck with his wind; title: Celebrating T.S. Eliot, part I and II; title: Lord Olivier; title: Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889; title: Two hundred years of the Bounty; title: Our eternal Holmes; title: The cold eye of Yeats; title: Father of the OED; title: Chaplin on stage; title: Evelyn Waugh : a revaluation; title: James Joyce : fifty years after; title: Tolkien : a centenary; title: Virginia Woolf mortua 1941; title: Marilyn.