The name is an international one — Bourgois, Borges, Borghese. Jorge Luis Borges had the kindnesss to say to Paul Theroux in Buenos Aires: ‘Anthony Burgess is good — a very generous man, by the way. We are the same — Borges, Burgess. It’s the same name.’ A concept, that of high citizenship of a burg or borough, united us. Although, in joke, he once called himself the Burgess of Argentina, I have never dared to call myself the Borges of Great Britain.

The Argentine Embassy gave a cocktail party for Borges, and there were evident secret service men milling around like fire ants. When Borges and I spoke in English they closed in for possible words of disaffection. I quoted the first line of Caedmon’s Hymn: ‘Nu we sculan herian heofonrices weard…’ Delighted, Borges responded with ‘Metodes mihte ond his modgethonc.’ And so we continued to the end of the poem in linear antiphony. The snoopers were bewildered: what was this foreign tongue — Albanian, Upper Borogrovian?

From Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, 1987, p.7 and p.176