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Anthony Burgess was inspired to write his most famous novel A Clockwork Orange by his real-life involvement in CIA-run mind- control experiments, a new biography claims.
The revelations, published next month, come as the controversial film version gets its first mainstream British television screening.
The new biography claims A Clockwork Orange's central theme - the use of brainwashing to quell evil impulses in the criminal mind - arose from Burgess's involvement with the British secret service and the CIA experiments.
It argues that many of the novel's other trademarks, including Nadsat, the fictional slang in which it is written, stem from the author's dealings with secret agents.
Burgess, a curmudgeonly interviewee, always refused to be drawn in any detail on his inspiration for A Clockwork Orange. When asked about the famous scene in which government scientists pump images of torture into the mind of...