http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess
Burgess's biographer Roger Lewis claimed that when he returned from his Burgess research trip to Malaysia in 1999, he met an ex-spy who "told me that Burgess had had dealings with the CIA and that the mind control experiments in A Clockwork Orange, which was written in 1961, were not the novelist's invention....I was told to look closely at what was written on the college pennants that the novel's main character, Alex, had on his bedroom wall: South 4; Metro cor-skol blue division; the boys of alpha. This, I was told, was an encryption. The words could be decoded to give the map reference to Fort Bliss, Texas, where experiments on interfering with the alpha wavelengths of the human brain were being conducted. The word bliss, moreover, appears on this same page six times".
When he asked the CIA if it would be in a position to release its files on John Wilson (Anthony Burgess), Lewis received this response: "We must neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any records. It has been determined that such information would be classified for reasons of national security under sections 1.5(c) (intelligence sources and methods) and 1.5(d) (foreign relations) of Executive Order 12958."
Burgess was dismissed as literary critic for the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post after he wrote a review of his own Inside Mr. Enderby and it appeared in the newspaper. The novel had been published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell, and the newspaper's editor did not know that Kell was Burgess. Burgess protested, to no avail, that Walter Scott had also once reviewed one of his own novels. The offending review, which was not at all commendatory, read in part: "This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals...and halitosis. It may well make some people sick....It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock." ...
Burgess announced on several occasions – it appeared to be a matter of some pride – that he had never in his life had carnal relations with an Englishwoman.
He enjoyed a miscellany of sexual partners from other lands, however, including Buginese, Japanese, Welsh, Malay, Chinese, Siamese, Italian and Sinhalese women. And he wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (p. 386 of the Penguin edition), that he had had sexual encounters "with Tamil women blacker than Africans, including a girl who could not have been older than twelve, but none with Bengalis and Punjabis". The vast majority of the liaisons had been, as he put it, "sadly commercial". ...
Burgess was occasionally troubled, especially in his earlier years, by the problem of premature ejaculation and writes comically about it in the Enderby tetralogy and elsewhere. But he claimed later to have discovered the secret of controlling climax and prolonging pleasure during sexual congress. It was, he wrote, "a matter of reciting Milton only – 'High on a throne of royal state...' (Paradise Lost, Book Two)." The comedian Benny Hill described Burgess as "the greatest living expert on sex". ...
Burgess was a Lancastrian, and one of his favourite dishes, mentioned many times in his novels, autobiography and elsewhere, was Lancashire Hotpot. The journalist Auberon Waugh described Burgess's recipe for hotpot as "disgusting".
Burgess often praised a delicacy local to his birthplace of Harpurhey known as cow-heel pie. ...
For a brief period during his studies of the Malay language and culture during the late 1950s, Burgess seriously considered becoming a Muslim.
Explaining the allure of Islam in a 1969 interview with the University of Alabama scholar Geoffrey Aggeler, Burgess remarked: "You believe in one god. You say your prayers five times a day. You have a tremendous amount of freedom, sexual freedom; you can have four wives. The wife herself has a commensurate freedom. She can achieve divorce in the same way a man can."
He later fantasized: "Four wives and an incalculable number of offspring, all attesting my virility and sustained by my patriarchal authority."
In the novel 1985 (1978), Burgess imagines what Britain might be like if a virile, triumphant Islam won far-reaching influence in the country. ...
Burgess was placed 1,579th after taking, and presumably failing, the Customs & Excise test in 1928.
One of Burgess's professors at the University of Manchester was A.J.P. Taylor. Grading one of Burgess's term papers, the great historian wrote: "Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge."
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