It is 40 years since Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was released in Britain, and 50 years since Anthony Burgess published the original novel of the same name. Although both the book and the film have established themselves among the canon of 20th-century classics, another Burgess/Kubrick project from the early Seventies has remained completely unknown. Newly discovered letters in the Burgess archives have revealed their intended collaboration on a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which will finally bear fruit later this year when BBC Radio broadcasts the premiere of Napoleon Rising, Burgess’s dramatic version of the Napoleon story. Napoleon Symphony, the novel that sprang from this project and was published originally in 1974, is being reissued by Serpent’s Tail this month.