“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.” […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 “Eros with Chilblains”, Pitter’s ironic reaction to Eric Blair’s attempts at seduction, remained unpublished in her lifetime.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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]