AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is fitting that I acknowledge my various debts. My fictitious narrator sometimes muddles up, sometimes gets right, authorities we take for granted but he, presumably, cannot know. The major ones are Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles. I thought it best to consult these in the original tongues and, for the last, I make special acknowledgement of the Graeco-Latin edition of the New Testament published in Graz and furnished with an apparatus criticus by Augustinus Merk S. J. My lesser authorities are numerous and include the exegesis of the Acts by F. F. Bruce, which forms a volume in The New International Commentary on the New Testament; Paul by M. Dibelius; St Paul the Traveller by A. M. Ramsay; Die Romfahrt des Apostels Paulus und die Seefahrtskunde in römischen Kaiseralter by H. Balmer; Jerusalem zur Zeit Jesu by Joachim Jeremias; the second volume of the New Testament Apocrypha in Edgar Hennecke’s edition; The Acts of the Christian Martyrs in the Oxford Early Christian Texts. I wish also to acknowledge the help of my friend Dr Vincenzo Labella, with whom I have worked on the scenarios for three television series, Moses the Lawgiver, Jesus of Nazareth and A.D. I prepared for the writing of all three by composing literary works first – the poem Moses and the novels Man of Nazareth and this present one. The amount of research that goes into a popular television series is not clearly to be seen in the finished product, which has to aim at great narrative simplicity and the conscious elimination of elements which would appeal only to the scholar or the reader of fiction. Thus, The Kingdom of the Wicked, which was partly written for its own sake, partly in anticipation of A.D., may be regarded both as an expansion of the latter and a literary diversion in its own right. The opinions, interpretations, errors, falsifications and ultimate pessimism of the supposed author (whom I supposedly translate from the supposed demotic Greek) are not always mine. The main thing we have in common is a location: he wrote in Helvetia, outside Lucanum, in the reign of Domitian; I write in Lugano in Switzerland under the democratic wings of I am not quite sure whom.
ALSO BY ANTHONY BURGESS
Through the distorted vision of a university lecturer, the truth about William Shakespeare’s love life emerges: his affairs with a black woman and a golden man, his conflicted relationship with his wife, his affection for a young boy. Beginning with a childhood obsession with words and a dream of being more than a glover’s son, the life and romance of the great Bard is unfolded.
The famed author of A Clockwork Orange takes us through the dramas of play-making in plague-ridden London. Rich in language and soaked in the Elizabethan spirit, this story of the immortal Shakespeare has emerged as a modern classic.
To discover more great fiction and to
place an order visit our website at
www.allisonandbusby.com
About the Author
ANTHONY BURGESS (25th February 1917–22nd November 1993) was one of the UK’s leading academics and most respected literary figures. A prolific author, Burgess found success as a novelist, critic, composer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer, essayist, poet and librettist, as well as working as a translator, broadcaster, linguist and educationalist. His fiction includes Nothing Like the Sun, a recreation of Shakespeare’s love life, but he is perhaps most famous for the complex and controversial novel A Clockwork Orange, exploring the nature of evil. Born in Manchester, he spent time living in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England, until his death in 1993.
By Anthony Burgess
Nothing Like the Sun
The Kingdom of the Wicked
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
13 Charlotte Mews
London W1T 4EJ
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain in 1985.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2012.
Copyright © 2002 by THE ESTATEOF ANTHONY BURGESS
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1283–0
Anthony Burgess, The Kingdom of the Wicked
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends