“What makes one man’s work better than another is his honesty.” Lee Miller “Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!” Sonia Orwell While researching George Orwell’s years in Paris, as a struggling writer and then a war correspondent, it occurred to me that […]
Sotheby’s recently auctioned a portrait of Charles Blair (1743-1802) by Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is the second time the painting has changed hands during the 21st century. In 2008, it sold for US$182,500 and the new owner has just forked out US$230,400 for this 18th century portrait of George Orwell’s great-great-grandfather. The catalogue included the […]
“The performance lasted only half an hour, but we spent hours in preparation, finding props, constructing the scenery etc., all of which [Orwell] supervised closely. It was ambitious. He arranged for plywood doors on either side to have saw cuts made in them so that Cromwell’s men could break them open with their pikes. It […]
Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, always described himself as coming from an Anglo-Indian family. Reading the recent post about Mussoorie’s Camel’s Back Cemetery at the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia website led me to reflect on some sad tales from my own […]
Why I Write is one of Orwell’s most widely-read, quoted and anthologised essays. It was published during the summer of 1946 in the fourth and final issue of Gangrel. What can we learn from examining the “pamphlet” where it first appeared besides that the title is a Scots word (from Anglo-Saxon) meaning “tramp”? When George […]
“But the thread that runs through all of Orwell’s writing is his obsession with getting to the truth. If it meant trashing friendships or jeopardising his own success, so be it. In the political magazine Tribune, he wrote in 1944 that ‘almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that […]
“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.” Animal Farm (1945) “This high-minded speech of the deputy hackney-coach-horse seemed to electrify all present; and a most touching scene took place, of the […]
“Came home to hear [illegible] Eric Blair is dead.” Jack Common Archival research into the melancholic world of the past, where nearly everyone who lives on the page is long dead, can be incredibly poignant – no matter how long ago the events being recovered took place. Turning the pages of Jack Common’s near illegible […]
“On the spot where we were standing is a small cabin, built of stones loosely piled together, as a shelter for travellers, which in joke has been named “The Castle of Mont Anvert.” An Englishman of the name of Blaire, who is residing at Geneva, has caused a more spacious one to be built at […]
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell The information wrestled from the record of an 18th century Chancery suit (Blair v Drake 1754) involving Orwell’s great-great-grandfather has been crucial for unlocking some previously closed research doors. This one scroll of parchment helped with several pieces of the […]
Raoul Peck’s ambitious new documentary pays homage to George Orwell’s intellectual achievement by exploring contemporary manifestations of the authoritarianism the writer so deplored. Since his premature death from tuberculosis in 1950, Orwell’s novels and essays have become authoritative primers for several generations of readers seeking insight into the dark arts of political propaganda, surveillance and […]
“Siegfried Charoux was a man of many gifts and warm friendships. Sculpture and painting were his chief modes of expression, but he was also an inventor of technical devices in those arts, a memorable amateur cook and a powerful arguer.” […]
George Orwell, who wrote for The Observer, described it as “the enemy of nonsense”. Now, more than ever, it has a job to do. James Harding, Editor-in-Chief It was with great interest I read James Harding’s note after the merger of The Observer with Tortoise Media back in April this year. Harding not only evoked […]
“Orwell must have had some scheme for winning the war, or perhaps, as William Empson remembered, for organised guerrilla warfare if there were a German invasion. He received a short acknowledgment on 26 March 1942 from Tom Jones, C. H., Lloyd George’s famous Cabinet Secretary: “your memorandum will be read by the Secretary of State […]
“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…”. […]
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 […]
Title: Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler: A Master Governor in British India (1890–1928) Author: Michael Fenwick Macnamara Published: 12 November 2024 ISBN: 9781803746586 Imprint: Peter Lang Verlag Format: Trade Paperback Pages: XVIII, 482 Pages RRP: US $112.95 “Sir Harcourt Butler, G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., who died yesterday at the age of 68, was one of the greatest 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 […]
“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; […]
“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) […]
“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 […]
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 […]
“In England, for centuries past, our so-called aristocracy has been recruited by successive waves of scoundrels who have enriched themselves upon the current swindle and whose position depends solely upon money.” […]
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, […]