Anthony Burgess was an English writer and critic most famous for A Clockwork Orange (1962), which Stanley Kubrick adapted into a film in 1971. Other prominent works include the Long Day Wanes (1956-9) set in the decolonizing Malay; the antiwar novel The Wanting Seed (1962); the critically esteemed historical novel Earthly Powers (1980); and Nothing Like the Sun (1964), inspired by the Dark Lady Sequence of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and written in the Bard’s stream of consciousness.  

“Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”