Now his lost dictionary of slang, abandoned after several hundred entries covering three letters, has been discovered.
“We found the surviving fragments of the dictionary at the bottom of a large cardboard box, packed underneath some old bedsheets.
Graham Foster, a researcher at the foundation, said the partially completed dictionary is still a “significant” discovery.
The writer Anthony Burgess invented futuristic slang for his cult novel A Clockwork Orange and was so fascinated by the language of the street that he began work on a dictionary more than 50 years ago.