Graphomania

ixty years after it was published, to a chorus of disapproval from British reviewers, Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fable, , has been included in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Read. Wherever Burgess, a lapsed Catholic who died in 1993, came to rest, he must be having a wry smile. He once described the book as ‘a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks’, and blamed Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film for encouraging people to think that it glorified sex and violence, ‘a misunderstanding that will pursue me until I die’.