What with all the seminars and symposiums, it has been a busy year for Burgess scholars. This week the carnival continued in Manchester, where the International Anthony Burgess Foundation hosted a centenary conference. Delegates had some of the great man’s musical compositions inflicted upon them, but the literary discussions sounded suitably wide-ranging and exotic: papers covered such intriguing topics as “The Spin and Drift of Linguistic Picaresque”, “Boredom in Burgess’s Malayan Novels” and “Anthony Burgess and Orson Welles: Hackwork and Bricolage.”