“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, […]
“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 […]
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), […]
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, […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
“… 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.” […]