The prolific and apparently inexhaustible Anthony Burgess writes like one of those glib and often fascinating Englishmen who are able to talk for hours at no risk of repeating themselves. When he is at the top of his form, as in Enderby, there are few writers who can touch him; when he is off, as in Nothing Like the Sun, he is a crashing bore; and, either on or off, he gives the impression of skating on perilously thin ice over a bottomless lake of utter balderdash, but he almost never falls in. He is not so much intoxicated with words as he is entranced with the phenomena of language, inflection, and his own considerable erudition. Narcissistic though this intoxication may be, it is also communicable through the medium of his prose. Burgess gives good value….

In an informative foreword [to The Eve of Saint Venus] that effectively...