[7] He described his background as lower middle class; growing up during the Great Depression, his parents, who were shopkeepers, were fairly well off, as the demand for their tobacco and alcohol wares remained constant.

[31] At his stationing in Gibraltar, which he later wrote about in A Vision of Battlements, he worked as a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching alongside Ann McGlinn in German, French and Spanish.

Burgess played a key role in "The British Way and Purpose" programme, designed to introduce members of the forces to the peacetime socialism of the post-war years in Britain.

[7] Burgess's flair for languages was noticed by army intelligence, and he took part in debriefings of Dutch expatriates and Free French who found refuge in Gibraltar during the war.

[37][better source needed] In 1954, Burgess joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer in Malaya, initially stationed at Kuala Kangsar in Perak.

[38][39] A variety of the music he wrote there was influenced by the country, notably Sinfoni Melayu for orchestra and brass band, which included cries of Merdeka (independence) from the audience.

After a brief period of leave in Britain during 1958, Burgess took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.

In the sultanate, Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State and, although it dealt with Brunei, to avoid libel the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African territory similar to Zanzibar, named Dunia.

Geoffrey Grigson writes:[37] He was, however, suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive south-east Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment.

"[51][Notes 1] Liana Macellari, an Italian translator twelve years younger than Burgess, came across his novels Inside Mr. Enderby and A Clockwork Orange, while writing about English fiction.

The negative reaction from a lecture that Burgess delivered to an audience of Catholic priests in Malta precipitated a move by the couple to Italy[52] after the Maltese government confiscated the property.

Eulogies at his memorial service at St Paul's, Covent Garden, London, in 1994 were delivered by the journalist Auberon Waugh and the novelist William Boyd.

Like many of his fellow English expatriates in Asia, Burgess had excellent spoken and written command of his operative language(s), both as a novelist and as a speaker, including Malay.

Burgess's repatriate years (c. 1960–1969) produced Enderby and The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping, a satire on the vacuity of popular culture.

The novel, which drew on Edgar I. Fripp's 1938 biography Shakespeare, Man and Artist, won critical acclaim and placed Burgess among the first rank novelists of his generation.

This is notable in the discussion of free will in A Clockwork Orange, and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church – due to what can be understood as Satanic influence – in Earthly Powers (1980).

The film treatments he produced include Amundsen, Attila, The Black Prince, Cyrus the Great, Dawn Chorus, The Dirty Tricks of Bertoldo, Eternal Life, Onassis, Puma, Samson and Delilah, Schreber, The Sexual Habits of the English Middle Class, Shah, That Man Freud and Uncle Ludwig.

Encouraged by the success of Tremor of Intent (a parody of James Bond adventures), Burgess wrote a screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me featuring characters from and a similar tone to the novel.

[68] It had Bond fighting the criminal organisation CHAOS in Singapore to try to stop an assassination of Queen Elizabeth II using surgically implanted bombs at Sydney Opera House.

In Oxfordshire he was an active member of the Adderbury Drama Group, where he directed multiple plays, including Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey, A Phoenix Too Frequent by Christopher Fry, The Giaconda Smile by Aldous Huxley and The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice.

His early symphony, Sinfoni Melayu (now lost), was an attempt "to combine the musical elements of the country [Malaya] into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".

[87] On the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme in 1966,[88] Burgess chose as his favourite music Purcell's "Rejoice in the Lord alway"; Bach's Goldberg Variations No.

1 in A-flat major; Wagner's "Walter's Trial Song" from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Debussy's "Fêtes" from Nocturnes; Lambert's The Rio Grande; Walton's Symphony No.

[89] "Burgess's linguistic training", wrote Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language: "... is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronunciations and the niceties of register".

In The Doctor is Sick, Dr Edwin Spindrift is a lecturer in linguistics who escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech".

Lewis claimed that during production in Malaysia of the BBC documentary A Kind of Failure (1982), Burgess's supposedly fluent Malay was not understood by waitresses at a restaurant where they were filming.

Beginning in 1995, Burgess's widow sold a large archive of his papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin with several additions made in subsequent years.

[94] Comprising over 136 boxes, the archive includes typed and handwritten manuscripts, sheet music, correspondence, clippings, contracts and legal documents, appointment books, magazines, photographs, and personal effects.

A substantial amount of unpublished and unproduced music compositions is included in the collection, along with a small number of audio recordings of Burgess's interviews and performances of his work.

[96] In 2014, the Ransom Center added the archive of Burgess's long-time agent Gabriele Pantucci, which also includes substantial manuscripts, sheet music, correspondence, and contracts.