And so we approach the end of Burgess’s extensive writing career and his surprisingly prolific foray into invented languages in his literature. I promised at the outset that we’d end up with Nazi Newspeak, and we shall.

Anthony Burgess’s curious compendium novel, The End of the World News, did not emerge until 1982, though most of its contents had been created in some form during the late 1970s. A tripartite narrative, it features the story of the dying Sigmund Freud, alongside a musical version of Leon Trotsky’s visit to New York. All of this is hastily glued together via a frame narrative which leads out of a disaster movie scenario in which an asteroid is set to collide with Earth. If this sounds like three separate stories that don’t belong together, that’s because they don’t.