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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 […]
George Orwell’s Great Grandfather: Charles Blair (1776-1854)
“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.” […]