Legendary intoxication with language and wordplay is very much in evidence as he (Burgess) evokes the raw, freewheeling spirit of the Elizabethan age

The story is intensely true to the surfaces and smells of Elizabethan London, and also Burgess's own final meditation on his great themes, the sexual and artistic impulses, and their end in death. A masterpiece.

If you want a Marlowe that breathes and an England that attacks the senses then you will find both in Anthony Burgess's astonishing final novel, A Dead Man in Deptford.

Burgess's novel moves with relish through fights, blasphemy and buggery to high talk of mathematics and necromancy in Raleigh's alternative think-tank, all written in well-judged pastiche.

A fast, funny, flawless recreation