Geoffrey Grigson on Orwell

“I once too had known this Eric Blair. But I had never had cause to remember him. I had forgotten that he was called Eric Blair, I had forgotten the encounter, until, last week…”.                                           […]

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story

The 80th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s novel has been celebrated this week from a range of perspectives in the mainstream media. Richard Blair wrote an article in The Guardian and The Orwell Society published a number of posts at the website by members. What follows is some less well-known insights into the publication […]

Orwell, the Anglo-Indian

George Orwell’s ambivalent relationship with his Anglo-Indian heritage is mostly discussed in the context of critiquing his writing set in Burma or when considering why he joined the Indian Imperial Police as a teenager (and his resignation five years later). Burmese Days, his ‘crisp, fierce, and almost boisterous attack on the Anglo-Indian’; The Road to […]

Orwell’s Window

“On being demobilised in 1945—having by then lived through the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War—I found that my social conscience was sufficiently blunted to allow me to consider devoting my whole time to painting, which I had already toyed with as a sort of occupational therapy in 1935–6; […]

Glimpses of a Biographer’s Diaries 1961-2000

“I request that no memorial service be held for me after my death and that no biography of me shall be written.”  Eric Blair, 18 January 1950 “…I have pulled together what he started, but sadly did not have a chance to finish…”  Ramdei Bowker Gordon Bowker (1934-2019) published a biography of George Orwell (2003) […]

Orwell’s Library

“When I first read War and Peace I must have been twenty, an age at which one is not intimidated by long novels, and my sole quarrel with his book (three stout volumes—the length of perhaps four modern novels) was that it did not go on long enough. It seemed to me that Nicholas and […]

Jonathan Swift and Newspeak

Gulliver’s Travels meant more to George Orwell ‘than any other book ever written’ and was an important literary antecedent in the development of Newspeak.  From the opening sentences of his first professional article as a journalist, published in Paris during 1928, Orwell was obsessively interested in how the state endeavoured to censor language: “The present […]

Orwell: A Clergyman’s Grandson

A happy vicar I might have been Two hundred years ago, To preach upon eternal doom And watch my walnuts grow; But born, alas, in an evil time, I missed that pleasant haven, For the hair has grown on my upper lip And the clergy are all clean-shaven.  (The Adelphi, December 1936) A Clergyman’s Daughter, […]

Two Letters: Orwell to Astor

“I admit he needs a little handling but he has a lot to give.”  (David Astor, 22 Nov. 1942) The proprietor and editor of the Observer newspaper, David Astor (1912-2001), was an important figure in the story of George Orwell’s professional and personal life; nor can the significance of Orwell in Astor’s be underestimated. They […]

Orwell’s Uncles: George & Arthur

Why did George Orwell join the Indian Imperial Police? He told Sonia Brownell – who was curious as to why her husband pursued this career rather than ‘Oxbridge’ – that it was a ‘long and complicated story’. He died before answering her question. The careers of two uncles, George Limouzin (1881-1977) and Arthur Blair (1846-1879), […]

Dear Charoux

George Orwell wrote at least thirteen letters to Siegfried Charoux which appear to be unknown to Orwell scholars. Twelve of these were handwritten from beds in three different hospitals, and one typed, at Orwell’s home on the Isle of Jura. On the 19th November 1948, Orwell wrote to his friend, the editor of The Observer, […]

Orwell’s Ancestors & Robert Southey

“We are staying with the Blairs & I like it. Nothing has surprised me more, particularly since I saw the house which is very small & furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors.” Eileen Blair née O’Shaughnessy (1936) Orwell’s admission, in ‘Why I Write’, about his inability to “abandon the world-view … acquired in childhood” provides […]

Orwell & Bedford

“I was working in Southwold, but my home was at Bedford. What we used to do mostly was to go for long walks, talking – discussing books, like Ulysses, and he would rail against Roman Catholicism … He really felt he ought to get down and really know what life was like without anything so […]

Orwell & the Russian Captain

“It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had told me to […]

The Crow

I knew a man, I knew a man As thin as any grudging crow. “Eros with Chilblains” was not the only poem Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) wrote about George Orwell. “The Crow”, published in The Bridge (1945), was scribed at her lowest ebb during World War II. She crossed the Battersea Bridge each day to work […]

Burma Sahib: A Personal (Re)View

It was with great expectation that I sat down to read Paul Theroux’s latest novel, Burma Sahib, the story of Eric Blair’s experience as a colonial policeman during the 1920s. A much experienced and admired master of the art of travel writing, who better to breathe life into the historical setting, landscape and people of the period? […]

Orwell’s Scottish Ancestry

“… sufficient evidence remains to be able to assert with confidence that Orwell was in male line descent from Alexander de Blair who flourished in the first half of the 13th century.”                                               […]

Lost Orwell BBC Radio Transcript Found in India

George Orwell was employed in the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service during World War Two but no recording of his voice has survived. A cache of his BBC radio scripts was discovered forty years ago – but many are still lost.  My lengthy list of ideas to pursue, people and sites to visit […]

Orwell’s Family: Aunt Nellie

“Miss Elaine Limouzin’s recital at the Salle Erard on Thursday evening, May 4th, drew a large audience, which thoroughly appreciated the very agreeable entertainment… Miss Limouzin has an effective way of writing drolleries for herself, and her bright fun in telling one of her own pieces – “Henry Sees Life” – an account of a […]

Eros with Chilblains

In 1930, Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) wrote a comic poem parodying her relationship with the man who was to become George Orwell. “Eros with Chilblains”, Pitter’s ironic reaction to Eric Blair’s attempts at seduction, remained unpublished in her lifetime. Ruth Pitter’s observations of Eric Blair’s struggle to become a writer, during the period 1927-33, make her […]

Orwell & La Tribune Indochinoise

Why were two of the earliest pieces of Orwell’s journalism, written in Paris during the late 1920s when he was still E.-A. Blair, published by a newspaper in Saigon?  E.-A. Blair published four personal essays in a left-wing weekly Parisian newspaper, Le Progrès Civique: Journal de Perfectionnement Social, during 1928-1929. Three of the articles explored poverty […]

Orwell: the Map & the Territory

“Once a biographer has mastered his subject, sucked it dry as an ant does an aphid and stored its own juice in his own book, the rest of us need no longer bother our heads about inconvenient notions the biographer’s subject may have offered for our consideration.”   Germaine Greer “A map is not the territory […]

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