The novelist Anthony Burgess was the 1980 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury. In four lectures given at Canterbury earlier this year he explored the two arts in rivalry and in collaboration.

'It is ironic that the most successful junction between words and music is to be found not in opera, not in lieder, but in a form that has been regarded as banal, the popular song lyrics of the 30s and 40s.'