George Orwell (Eric Blair) was shot through the throat by a sniper on 20 May 1937. He discusses the incident in Homage to Catalonia. His wife (Eileen Blair) sent a telegram from Barcelona at noon on 24 May 1937 to [...]
May 202013
May 012013
10 Rambla de los Estudios, Barcelona. 1 May 1937 Dear Eric, You have a hard life. I mean to write to Mother with the news, but there are some business matters. Now I think of these, they’re inextricably connected with [...]
Apr 142013
14 April 1942 Dear Mr. Forster, Many thanks for your letter. As to the questionnaire by the BBC which you mention,1 I don’t think it ever bore much fruit, but I am finding out what replies did come in and [...]
Apr 022013
The New Statesman and Nation, 3 September 1932 Common lodging houses, of which there are several hundred in London, are night-shelters specially licensed by the LCC.1 They are intended for people who cannot afford regular lodgings, and in effect they [...]
Mar 152013
Gleb Struve (1898-1985), a scholar and specialist on Soviet literature, was at the School of Slavonic Studies, London University, in 1944. He wrote to Orwell and congratulated him on his piece in the Tribune column about Soviet falsification of history. They [...]
Mar 012013
Tribune, 23 November 1945 The recent article by Tribune’s Vienna correspondent provoked a spate of angry letters which, besides calling him a fool and a liar and making other charges of what one might call a routine nature, also carried [...]
Feb 142013
17 September 1949 The Star reported: A specialist’s verdict will decide whether fair-haired Miss Sonia Brownell,1 engaged to novelist George Orwell, will have a bedside wedding in hospital. Mr Orwell who has been ill for two years is now in [...]
Feb 072013
These notes for an essay on Evelyn Waugh were written by Orwell in his last Literary Notebook. The ellipses seen below are Orwell’s. He said: “I hope it’s dipsomania. That is simply a great misfortune that we must all help him [...]
Feb 042013
It has not proved possible to date precisely when George Orwell prepared the first part of the typescript of his essay on Evelyn Waugh, nor to date exactly the notes he wrote in his last Literary Notebook, though all are [...]
Jan 282013
Doublethink, a word coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, describes the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts. It is related to, but distinct from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Its opposite is cognitive dissonance, where the two beliefs cause [...]