Homage to Qwert Yuiop, also published as But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?, is a collection of essays by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess

John Burgess Wilson  – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...

 published in 1986.

Book reviews form the bulk of the content, though there are various essays and an interview Burgess conducted with Graham Greene.

Large tracts deal with the written word, especially a variety of linguistic

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 reviews and papers, as well as a great many dictionaries, phrase books, books of quotations, etc. Burgess was widely known as a polyglot

Polyglot (person)

A polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. A bilingual person can speak two languages fluently, whereas a trilingual three; above that the term multilingual may be used.-Hyperpolyglot:...

, and frequently includes linguistic anecdotes (etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 and so forth), from English, Russian, Greek, Latin and Malay.

A section of the book deals with the movie business, including histories of a variety of film stars and early Hollywood producers, about many of whom Burgess had strong opinions.

Another section is devoted to reviews of biographies of authors, including Dickens, Beckett and Hemingway. The book finishes with reviews of literature by novelists including H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

 and Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...

.

The book displays the tremendous amount of knowledge Burgess had accumulated by the age of 66, especially concerning geography, travel, cultures, languages and literature.

The title of the collection is a reference to the urban legend of an Hungarian man named Qwert Yuiop, who supposedly invented the modern English keyboard layout and left his name lightly hidden in it ('qwert yuiop' are the ten letters that make up the top row of letters on a standard QWERTY

QWERTY

QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...

keyboard).

• (1986) ISBN 0-349-10440-9