George Orwell
Ukraine’s Foreign Legion was doomed from the start
It seems that people would rather fight for a death cult than a democracy. At most, 15,000 foreigners have fought…
The brilliance of BBC Alba
During lockdown, a friend and I moved into a flat that had a difficult relationship with the TV aerial. Ineptitude…
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Social, moral, architectural and linguistic problems collide in this gem of a novel set in lightly altered contemporary Tokyo
Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination
A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain
For decades, the CIA smuggled works by George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and many others into the Soviet bloc in a battle for hearts, minds and intellects
Carry on Kafka: this is our Brave New World
An ex-copper who blogs as Dominic Adler – not his real name – came up with a good phrase this…
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the…
Falsifying history can only increase racial tension
Frank Furedi argues that historic memory is the key to the identity of any coherent community, and that attacking it undermines a population’s solidarity
Tall tales of the Golden East: the fabulous fabrications of two 20th-century con artists
Capitalising on his Afghan-Indian heritage, Ikbal Shah claimed to have crucial inside knowledge of Central Asia, while his son Idries later purveyed a rebranded Sufism for the West
Reluctant servant of the Raj: Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux, reviewed
Few personal details survive about Eric Blair’s life as a policeman in Burma, making his years in the East fertile ground for the novelist
Ravenous rats
Surprisingly for a novel riffing on Orwell’s dystopia, Julia is portrayed as a cheerful young woman uninterested in politics and believing in nothing at all
Barefaced lies
Mark Hollingsworth describes how the KGB became the world’s most industrious conspiracy-theory factory, with its agents of influence dedicated to sowing maximum confusion
A woman of some importance
Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s creative influence on her husband George Orwell has been ignored for far too long, says Marina Benjamin
Prolific
The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal…
Writers to the rescue
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
Legion of Babel
During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight…
Is this the end of history?
Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill…
Pure poison
The big mistake people make with Alan Bennett is to conflate him with his fellow Yorkshireman David Hockney. But whereas…
Society isn’t systemically racist. It is systemically woke
Structural, systemic, systematically — we’re hearing these words a lot at the moment. Racism isn’t individual. It is structural or…
There’s nothing equal about this virus
Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their…
Swede freedom
There’s no lockdown in sight here
Coronavirus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to expand the state
Since this is the nearest most of us have ever got to living under the Blitz, I’ve been re-reading George…
Stranger things
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the……
Why we still need Orwell
I’ve been reading a new biography of George Orwell that’s been published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of his…
‘A triumph of meandering’
Sara Wheeler 27 November 2021 9:00 am
This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian…