In the opening pages of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) he describes meeting an Italian militiaman in Barcelona in December 1936 when he joined the fight against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell added more details (and a poem) to the story of that meeting in his 1942 essay Looking Back on...
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The Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm was intended for Ukrainians living in the camps for Displaced Persons in Germany under British and American administration after World War II. These, as indicated in a letter from the man who organised the translation and distribution, Ihor Szewczenko, were people who supported the October Revolution and who...
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Extract from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). From the point of view of political theory there were only three parties that mattered, the P.S.U.C., the P.O.U.M., and the C.N.T.–F.A.I., loosely described as the Anarchists. I take the P.S.U.C. first, as being the most important; it was the party that finally triumphed, and even...
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Excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) reprinted in the George Orwell collected edition England Your England and Other Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953). Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the...
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Excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) reprinted in the George Orwell collected edition England Your England and Other Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953). As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well...
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