 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Homage to Qwert Yuiop" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(April 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986) — published in the United States asBut Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? — is a collection of essays and reviews byAnthony Burgess, first published inThe Observer,The New York Times andThe Times Literary Supplement. The title is a reference to the top row of letters on a standardQWERTY keyboard.
The contents of the book are arranged loosely by subject, covering "travel, language, film, music and, overwhelmingly, literature."[1] Much of the book deals with the written word, includinglinguistic reviews of dictionaries, phrase books, and books of quotations. Burgess was widely known as apolyglot, and frequently includes linguistic anecdotes (etymology and so forth), from English, Russian, Greek, Latin and Malay.
Burgess also writes on the movie business, including a celebration ofSophia Loren and accounts of his own experiences as a scriptwriter. There are reviews of biographies (of writers such asH. G. Wells,Robert Graves andDashiell Hammett), fiction and autobiographies, as well as an interview withGraham Greene.
The book displays the tremendous amount of knowledge Burgess had accumulated by the age of 66, especially concerning geography, travel, cultures, languages and literature.