Interviewer: "On what occasions do you lie?" Anthony Burgess: "When I write, when I speak, when I sleep."

He was the last great modernist. Novelist, composer, librettist, essayist, semanticist, translator, critic, Anthony Burgess's versatility and erudition found expression in more than fifty books and dozens of musical compositions, from operas, choral works and song cycles to symphonies and concertos.

Here now is a kaleidoscope of a book--the culmination of twenty years of writing and research--about a man who remains best known for A Clockwork Orange, the source of Stanley Kubrick's ground breaking, mind bending and prescient film.

Tracking Burgess from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, the author assesses Burgess's struggles and uncovers the web of truth and illusion about the writer's famous antic disposition. Burgess, the author argues, was just as much a literary confidence man and prankster as a consummate wordsmith.

Outrageously funny, honest and touching, Anthony Burgess explores the divisions that characterize its irascible subject and his darkly comic, bleakly beautiful world of fiction.