“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 […]
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 […]