Tribune, 4 June 1943 “When a man of true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this infallible sign, that all the dunces are in conspiracy against him.” So wrote Jonathan Swift, two hundred years before the publication of Ulysses. If you consult any sporting manual or yearbook you will find...
Read More »
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 does not coincide with some great external event, such as the ending of the...
Read More »
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. They were friends for nearly a year. This is the time when Orwell was...
Read More »
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, is the fictional book that is an integral thematic and plot element in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. In the totalitarian society of Oceania, ruled by the seemingly omnipotent and omniscient Party, in its propaganda, Emmanuel Goldstein is the principal enemy of the state — a former member of the Inner Party – continually conspiring against...
Read More »
Bulletin of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification1 (P.O.U.M.2) 3 February 1937 British Author With the Militia At the beginning of January, we received a visit in Barcelona from Eric Blair, the well-known British author, whose work is so much appreciated in all English-speaking left circles of thought. Comrade Blair came to Barcelona, and...
Read More »
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 it is not, as it may appear at first sight, a reason for simply...
Read More »
Horizon, October 1941 The role of writers to-day, when every free nation and every free man and woman is threatened by the Nazi war-machine, is a matter of supreme importance. Creative writers, poets, novelists and dramatists have a skill, imagination and human understanding which must be utilized as fully as the skill of journalists....
Read More »
Tribune, 24 December 1943. Written by George Orwell but published under the name ‘John Freeman’. The thought of Christmas raises almost automatically the thought of Charles Dickens, and for two very good reasons. To begin with, Dickens is one of the few English writers who have actually written about Christmas. Christmas is the most...
Read More »
Orwell’s Payments Book records at 20 December 1943 £5.5.0 for a special article of 2,000 words for Tribune. This has not been traced in Tribune under Orwell’s name, but it seems certain that a slightly longer article, Can Socialists be Happy?, attributed to a John Freeman, is what is referred to. It was certainly...
Read More »
Tribune, 12 July 1940 The reprinting of Jack London’s The Iron Heel brings within general reach a book which has been much sought after during the years of Fascist aggression. Like others of Jack London’s books it has been widely read in Germany, and it has had the reputation of being an accurate forecast...
Read More »
George Orwell Biography 
Books 
About – Nineteen Eighty-Four 
Essays 
Goldstein’s book from George Orwell’s 1984 
Images from George Orwell’s 1984 manuscript (Part 1) 
Animal Farm 
About – Burmese Days 
Nineteen Eighty-Four 
Review of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” 
Politics and the English Language 
1984 research guide 
British Rations and the Submarine War 
Pictures of George Orwell (Part 1) 
A Nice Cup of Tea 