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…
Tag Archive for communism
Books, Reference
From Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Woodcock (1912–1995) was a Canadian writer and scholar. He met Orwell during the war while Orwell was at the BBC and when Woodcock was active in the peace movement, working with British Anarchists and libertarians. They became good friends. This is the text of…
Journalism
French election will be influenced by the fact that women will have first vote (April 1945)
Manchester Evening News, 16 April 1945 No date has yet been fixed for the General Election, but it has been officially stated that the municipal elections will take place at the end of this month provided that the date fixed…
Reference
Kay Ekevall remembers George Orwell
Kay Ekevall (b. 1911) ran a secretarial agency and lived near the bookshop on the corner of Pond Street, Hampstead, where Orwell worked part-time in 1934-5; and being of literary tastes, she got to know him by talking about books.…
Reference
Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (P.O.U.M.)
The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Spanish: Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM) was a Spanish communist political party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (Izquierda Comunista de España, ICE) and the Workers and…
Reviews
Review of “Burnt Norton”, “East Coker” and “The Dry Salvages” by T. S. Eliot
Poetry London, October-November 1942; reprinted in Little Reviews Anthology, edited by Denys Val Baker, 1943. There is very little in Eliot’s later work that makes any deep impression on me. That is a confession of something lacking in myself, but…
Essays
My Country Right or Left
Folios of New Writing, No. 2, Autumn 1940 Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together,…
Books, Documents
George Orwell’s statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell wrote a statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four in mid-June 1949 following misunderstandings about his intentions in the book. These arose especially from an article in the New York Daily News which, he had been told, interpreted his novel as an…
Books
Publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four on 8 June 1949
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949. It was published five days later by Harcourt, Brace and Company in New York. Secker & Warburg printed 26,575 copies for the first edition; a second impression, of…
Books, Extracts
“Three parties that mattered” – An extract from Homage to Catalonia
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,…