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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 […]