As a teenager, I read ‘The Comedians’ and in my twenties ‘The Power and the Glory’, ‘The Quiet American’ and ‘The Human Factor’. I remember swapping my copy of The Quiet American for ‘Off the Rails in Phnom Penh’ when in Laos. The Human Factor I read in a hostel in Colombia. In my early …
Devil of a State, published 1961, is set in Dunia, a fictional East African state on the verge of independence. In this novel Burgess draws on his experiences as an Educational Officer in the Sultanate of Brunei where the original manuscript was set. Fearing a possible libel case, the publisher, Hutchinson, had Burgess change the …