John Anthony Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 - 25 November 1993) British writer ; usually known as simply Anthony Burgess he also published under the names John Burgess Wilson and Joseph Kell.

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• 'What's going to be then, eh?'
  There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard through dry.
  • A Clockwork Orange (1962)

• It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his duty to show.
  • Introduction to 1986 American edition of A Clockwork Orange

• The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
  • Introduction to 1986 American edition of A Clockwork Orange

Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern, Watching the night and its candles gutter,

Snoring at sunrise.

In England now the wind blows high And clouds brush rudely at the sky; The blood runs thinly through my frame, I half-caress the hearthstone’s flame, Oppressed by autumn’s desolate cry.

Then homesick for the south am I, For where the lucky swallows fly, But each warm land is just a name In England now.

The luckless workers I espy With chins dipped low and collars high, Walk into winter, do not blame The shifting globe. A gust of shame Represses my unmanly sigh In England now.

• • poem in English Literature: A Survey for Students

Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy...

 ‘What you could do with is a nice strong cup of tea, sir. I’ll tell the kuki to make you one.’
 ‘Does it really do any good, Nabby? (That was better.) ‘I’ve tried every damn thing.’....

His heart beating faster, his throat drying, Nabby whispered to the driver, ‘Not so bloody fast.’

 ‘Tuan?’
 ‘All right, all right.’ One of these days he must really get down to the language. There never seemed to be the time, somehow....

Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him....

He spoke clean grammatical Urdu....

Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.

“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”

He rubbed his groin in a transport of vicarious concupiscence.

…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.

‘Sir, we are trying to work because we are having to take the examination in a very brief time from now, but the younger boys are not realizing the importance of our labours and they are creating veritable pandemoniums while we are immersed in our studies. To us who are their lawful and appointed superiors they are giving overmuch insolence, nor are they sufficiently overawed by our frequent threatenings. I would be taking it, sir, as inestimable favour if you would deliver harsh words and verbal punishing to them all, sir, especially the Malay boys, who are severely lacking in due respectfulness and incorrigible to discipline also.’

 ‘Quite all right, sir. Plenty of time. You have a sleep, sir.’
 Hood turned over with his fat bottom towards Nabby Adams. Thank God. Nabby Adams tiptoed over again to the serving-hatch, ordered another, downed it. He began to feel a great deal better. After yet another he felt better still. Poor old Robin Hood wasn’t such a bad type. Stupid, didn’t know a gear-box from a spare tyre, but he meant well. The world generally looked better. The sun shone, the palms shook in the faint breeze, a really lovely Malay girl passed by the window. Proud of carriage, in tight baju and rich sarong, she balanced voluptuous haunches. Her blue-black hair had some sort of a flower in it; how delicate the warm brown of her flat flower-like face.
 ‘What time is it, Nabby?’....

...it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.

“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women

His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence.

At the back some newcomers were being given a resume of the plot.

Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…

The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.

It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden.

“...reality’s always dull, you know...”

“for f---’s sake”

• • The Long Day Wanes: Time for a Tiger

...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.

Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy.

She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden.

...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law...

...he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips.

…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…

‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’

He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them.

Later they would...pant in venery.

…Talbot…fat-boy-buttocked.

He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense.

…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…

My dear Hardman,

 It was pleasant... I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and the for the East to dominate the West.

…a striped sarong and a pyjama jacket, the best of both worlds.

…English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.

I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women.

• • The Long Day Wanes: The Enemy in the Blanket

Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.

Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile.

...the eyes, black, were all East - houris, harems, beds scented with Biblical spices; nose and lips were pan-Mediterranean. Her body...was that of the Shulamite and Italian film stars. The décolletage, with its promise of round, brown, infinitely smooth, vertiginous sensual treasure, was a torment to the blood....Many had promised marriage, but all had gone home, the promise unfulfilled....quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure.

Him they would not harm, Englishmen being, though infidel, yet the race of past District Officers, judges, doctors, men perhaps, in their time, more helpful than otherwise, powerful but mild.

…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…

Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.

A good morning’s work, and he felt he deserved a small beer in Loo’s kedai round the corner.

...even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.

“…And the rising sun shall rise yet higher, destroying with its flaming fire the evil will of the wicked West, but smiling warmly on the rest”

Lim Cheng Po, Anglican, Royalist, cricketer, respectable husband and father, allowed his animal reflexes out for an avenue walk on the lead.

‘I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.’

…I shall often think of you and the things we did.

“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”

She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.

…the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose

There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.

‘Oh, love, love, love -

Love on a hilltop high,
Love against a cloudless sky,
Love where the scene is
Painted by a million stars,
Love with martinis
In the cabarets and bars.
Oh, love, love, love...’

‘It binds the races together,’ said Crabbe.

...the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world....

...the dark brought out the prostitutes, Malay divorcees mostly, quietly moving from light to light, gaudy and graceful, like other of night’s creatures.

“...I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist. What do you think I’m doing here in early middle age?”

..the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.

‘it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts’

an Australian….They have suffered under the yoke of the English…

‘Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves....We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilized temperate climate.’

Mr Liversedge...saw the whole ridiculous Oriental susah in true proportion. Here men would murder for five dollars, here men would seek divorce because their wives sighed at the handsomeness of the film star P.Ramlee....nodding at the lucid exposition of Mr Lim from Penang, though contemning inwardly the Pommie accent...

…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.

• • The Long Day Wanes: Beds in the East

I know little about the women of my own race

…of course, keep-fit people are no good in bed…

…a man who sold meat but knew nothing of the poetry of the slaughterhouse….Ted Arden was no ice-cream butcher.

…the mysterious and lucrative Orient…

I was only the returned Oriental eccentric, drunk at that…

It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East.

“…The returned exile and how he sees philistine England…”

The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.

As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.

Well-fed and liquored, I responded with ardour.

‘That it is still possible for a man of initiative to make money in the East is the firm opinion of balding, plump Mr Denham who adds, however, “Not if you take a wife with you.” Mr Denham has scathing things to say about Englishwomen and their lack of domestic virtues. He particularly selects their cooking as a target, but considers also that they are far inferior to the slant-eyed beauties of the Orient in the all-important matter of fidelity to their menfolk. Mr Denham is considered an authority on the women of Japan who, he says, are lovely, demure and submissive....On his own admission he has little time for anything except money, dalliance, and the “imbibing of liquors of all kinds”.’

Ah, well, if they wanted their adultery, what did it matter to me? I hadn’t much room to talk, anyway, with my five-pound prostitutes who did a bunk and the Japanese girls who cost far less and didn’t do a bunk and whatever I was likely to pick up in Colombo.

‘You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?’

‘…Your little feuilleton…recording…my crude nabob’s philistinism…’

Mr Raj had been purely Orientally and fancifully complimentary (‘So great a man, his lingam as long and thick as a tree, the father of whole villages’)

‘…The senior Mr Denham’s,’ he said, with deadly Eastern realism, ‘will perhaps only be better in the grave

‘I come here to your beautiful country -’ Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil oafter coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ‘- your beautiful country, I say,’ he said defiantly. ‘…So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments...’

Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means ‘pretending to be a lion’….It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.

…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..

‘I knew im, she knew im, e knew im, we all knew im.’ After this paradigm, which impressed his hearers, he paused. ‘E was a customer ere. Not perhaps one of the best customers. Not like Roger Alliwell ere oo drinks whisky to the tune of near one bottle a day, which is good for the ouse and, as far as we can see, does imself no arm. But e was a customer, loyal to the ouse, regular in attendance, and that’s all we ask of any man or woman for that matter. Well, now e’s gone. We’re sorry e’s gone. You’re sorry e’s gone. I’m sorry e’s gone. And we can’t say much more than that. Now the question is: is e gone to a better place? I don’t know the answer to that, nor do you, nor does she. Perhaps e knows,’ said Ted, shrugging towards the vicar, ‘because it’s is job to know. But the rest of us don’t know. Right. But I say this. E done is best for all. Never a ard word come out of that man’s art. Right. Well loved e was and for all is faults we would love im still, if e was still alive. But e’s dead now and we wish im all the best in is new destination. And I can’t say no fairer than that.’

That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.

…surely that sneered-at suburban life was more stable than this shadow life…in a country where no involvement was possible…better than the sordid dalliance that soothed me after work?

Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration, but unfortunately

• • The Right to an Answer

‘But you like her, don’t you?’ asked Howarth. ‘You like Mrs Connor?’ For himself, thought Howarth, he did not particularly like Mrs Connor. He desired Mrs Connor, however.

Howarth began to see that, however much it was against one’s will and convictions, sides had to be taken, the dreary corrupt world of politics had to be entered by the good and dispassionate, to protect and avenge the weak. But one always entered too late.

There was a silence. Outside, and most unfortunately, a boy could be heard calling to another boy: ‘Piss off, Cowie.’ Stern looks were fixed on Woolton.

• • The Worm and the Ring

The Antipods…were always ready to burst.

There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.

A…taxi…Chinese youth…”You,” he said.

…for thy huggest they bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.

…wild-life protection cranks, birth control propagandists…

Lydgate opened the sort of letter…”My dear husband I very good…I come in flying ship…we be very happy…love.” It was as satisfactory a letter as he had ever received from a woman.

"All right,” said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.

…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood

From ancient drains and sewers of the language (maritime inns and brothels…), from scrawls in the catacombs…whoremasters’ chapbooks…the vocabulary of tavern brawls

…no European whore’s mock-respectability.

…the sin of gluttony, also the sin of lecherous intent toward an honourable and high-placed matron….But more sin is to come, and that sin a double one, namely of lechery in act, perhaps venial in the young but by no means to be condoned, and of adultery, which Saint John saith shall be punished by fire for the act and brimstone for the stink of the ordure of the partners in that sin….She is but a heathen….With the instinct of her kind she knoweth the best and most secret places for lechery….thou are bent on sin, the act of darkness….On her breath is no honey but the smell of strong drink, the potent mingling of barley and juniper in deadly ferment….One man is from the Antipodes but, contrary to the superstition of the vulgar, he is like other men….It is he who seeth the cabin where thy lust worketh itself out, he remembereth lewd advice of the charioteer of Cathay….approacheth on tiptoe the sound of beastly gratification….Lust croucheth now above in the rooftree, his wings fearfully foldeth….But in his rage he spareth not her, calling her Jezebel and harlot….

Head of the Faithful, Head of the Infidel…

…the inevitable colonial philistinism.

Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.

…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)

…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures

“…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…”

…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.

“…My name…is Mahalingam….is Sanskrit for ‘large or great or mighty generative organ’ - this, of course, having more a religious (through associations of religion and fertility) significance than an anatomical one. Though anatomically and…socially the name has not proved inept.

• • Devil of a State

… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’

I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.

England become a feeble-lighted Moon of America…

• • One Hand Clapping

…my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis…

‘This damnable sex, boys - ah, you do well to writhe in your beds at the very mention of the word. All the evil of our modern times springs from unholy lust, the act of the dog and the bitch on the bouncing bed, limbs going like traction engines, the divine gift of articulate speech diminished to squeals and groans and pantings. It is terrible, terrible, an abomination before God and His Holy Mother. Lust is the fount of all other of the deadly sins, leading to pride of the flesh, covetousness of the flesh, anger in the thwarting of desire, gluttony to feed the spent body to be at it again, envy of the sexual prowess and sexual success of others, sloth to admit enervating day-dreams of lust. Only in the married state, by God’s holy grace, is it sanctified, for then it becomes the means of begetting fresh souls for the peopling of the Kingdom of Heaven.’

…the cold deflation of crapula…

…British louts with guitars and emetic little songs…infantile screamers…

‘…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…’

‘…you read mostly menus and the moles on whores’ bellies….’

…satyromaniacal…

…enjoyed Dravidian transports.

• • Tremor of Intent

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

...To the mother hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: ‘It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you’re the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other.’ He did a comic oenophil act with the bottle of Marsovin...

...in the bar, he treated me and all around us to a loud recapitulation, based loosely on the visas and entry permits in his passport, of the more scandalous elements of our life together. ‘New York, dear, and that pissyarsed publisher of yours who tried to stop me going to the fistfuck party, dangerous he said, lethal, stupid sod. Toronto, that was where we had that little whatsit at the same time, remember, lovely kind of henna colour, half Indian, half French, not an ounce of bloody Anglosaxon blood remember.’ He got drunk very rapidly on undiluted Pernod. ‘The man on the Washington Post who once had it off with a ghost. At the...

`You’re staying here, fucker,’ the milky-eyed one said. You’ve got to get done.’ `You and whose navy?’ I quoted vulgarly from one of my own stupid plays. `Summat to say about it?’ somebody said, flushed face an inch from mine. `Got it in for the fucking Andrew?’ `I’m getting out of here,’ and I marvelled at myself as I grabbed the rump of the smashed glass from the runny zinc and swivelled it from one to another of the blue swayers like a flashlamp. `Ah, playing dirty. Right, here it comes.’ But the proffered fist with its tattooed LOVE AND DUTY with blue flowers could not really connect, drink having drained strength from the arm beyond it. The door opened again and to a windier blackness two genuine matelots came in, French, pompommed caps with MAZARIN on them. ‘Parleyvoo wee wee. Jigajig traybon.’ Of course, my original play title. I dropped the tumbler stump on the filthy wet floor and, for some reason, ground it growling with my heel among the unground out fag ends. Then I shouldered and pushed out. ‘Come back, fucker, to get fucked.’ ‘Dick,’ I called to the sidestreet. There was only one lamp, dimmish, near a Byrrh poster. I ran inland and came to an alleyway. I heard groaning, then a splash. The thin moon emerged to show Dick, sober and vigorous, holding the doubled up sailor up with strong clasping arms round his middle. The sailor’s trousers were right down, hobbling his ankles. Dick was buggering away deep and cheerfully in brutal Norman Douglas style. ‘Just one second, dear,’ Dick smiled, ‘then he’s all yours. Not all that tight, surprising really. Relaxation consequent on nausea and so on.’ And still he ground away. Then he shuddered, lips apart, as on unsugared lemon juice as he spattered. ‘Delicious. So mindless. There, come on, angelface, get it all up for daddy.’ The two voidings were one. I had an erection. I was bitterly ashamed. Then there were voices calling. ‘Porky. Fucking Porky.’ Fucked Porky, really,’ Dick said, releasing him into his own vomit. `All right, dear,’ buttoning up, ‘he’s all yours.’ And Dick ran with long expert strides into the blackness of the alley as the moon buttoned itself into its fly of cloud. It was as if he knew the damned place blind. The boy lay heaving, terribly besmirched, bare arse to the sky. A great gust blew the cloud tatters off the moon. Then Porky’s mates were there.

...Carlo delivered what began as a panegyric and ended as an anathema....His brother...regarded by the stupid and the wicked as a sort of imbecilic weakness, an infantile inability to come to terms with the sophisticated world of affairs. Because he was just he was to be seen as a quixotic madman, because he was virtuous he was to be taken for a eunuch, because he was magnanimous he was to be gulled and derided.... ‘There are many here today in this great modern temple of the Lord who have come not out of the piety of friendship or respect but following sickening forms of hypocritical convention, and among these are some that are soiled, bemerded, stinking with wealth amassed unjustly, wealth made out of torture and murder and the exploitation of human frailty, a precarious wealth as insubstantial as fairy gold, demon gold rather, that will crumble into dust at the dawn of the recovery of sanity and virtue by a great nation temporarily demented, an angelic land to its immigrants that is now set upon by the devils of greed, stupidity and madness...’

‘Find a cosy table Inside a restaurant, Somewhere formidable Where you’ll be tr¿s contents. Let your lady fair know That she is all you see, Prime her with a Pernod Or three. Watch her crack a lobster And strip it to the buff, Rough as when a mobster Gets tough. Keep the wine cascading And you’ll ensure Une petite spécialité called l’amour....’

And now, as so often happened, my brain in a fever took over the datum of the dream and enriched and expanded it. Norman Douglas spoke pedantically on behalf of the buggers. `We have this right, you see, to shove it up. On a road to Capri I found a postman who had fallen off his bicycle, you see, unconscious, somewhat concussed. He lay in exactly the right position. I buggered him with athletic swiftness: he would come to and feel none the worse.’ The Home Secretary nodded sympathetically while the rain wept on to him in Old Palace Yard. `I mean, minors. I mean, there’d be little in it for us if you restricted the act to consenting males over, say, eighteen. Boys are so pliable, so exquisitely sodomizable. You do see that, don’t you, old man?’ The Home Secretary nodded as if to say: Of course, old public-school man myself, old boy. I saw a lot of known faces, Pearson, Tyrwit, Lewis, Charlton, James, all most reasonable, claiming the legal right to maul and suck and bugger. I put myself in the gathering and said, also most reasonable, that it was nothing to do with the law: you were still left with the ethics and theology of the thing. What we had a right to desire was love, and nothing hindered that right. Oh nonsense, he’s such a bore. As for theology, isn’t there that apocryphal book of the Bible in which heterosexuality is represented as the primal curse?

Goebbels...now made an applauded entrance. He was no man to improvise a word or two of greeting; he had typewritten sheets.... He spoke of the cinema as the popular voice of the state...those products, themselves a means of cleansing the world film market through their purity and excellence of the regrettable decadent ordures excreted by international Jewry....

I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit.... I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance...

Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it...

• • Earthly Powers

I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised.

‘You served here how long, Cornelius?’ ‘Long enough to learn about what they believe. Not long enough to learn to speak their language well enough to get their confidence. Not long enough to learn how to read their books. Now I’ve three years before retirement and a measure of spare time for getting down to it.’ ‘This, you know,’ Marcellus said, ‘is all wrong. You’re not here to get their confidence or read their books. They’re a colonized people. We’re here to give orders. ‘They’d rather die than obey some of the Roman orders. Besides, it’s laid down that their religion is inviolate...’

God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses.

• • The Kingdom of the Wicked