Sotheby’s recently auctioned a portrait of Charles Blair (1743-1802) by Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is the second time the painting has changed hands during the 21st century. In 2008, it sold for US$182,500 and the new owner has just forked out US$230,400 for this 18th century portrait of George Orwell’s great-great-grandfather. The catalogue included the […]
“The performance lasted only half an hour, but we spent hours in preparation, finding props, constructing the scenery etc., all of which [Orwell] supervised closely. It was ambitious. He arranged for plywood doors on either side to have saw cuts made in them so that Cromwell’s men could break them open with their pikes. It […]
Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, always described himself as coming from an Anglo-Indian family. Reading the recent post about Mussoorie’s Camel’s Back Cemetery at the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia website led me to reflect on some sad tales from my own […]
Why I Write is one of Orwell’s most widely-read, quoted and anthologised essays. It was published during the summer of 1946 in the fourth and final issue of Gangrel. What can we learn from examining the “pamphlet” where it first appeared besides that the title is a Scots word (from Anglo-Saxon) meaning “tramp”? When George […]
“But the thread that runs through all of Orwell’s writing is his obsession with getting to the truth. If it meant trashing friendships or jeopardising his own success, so be it. In the political magazine Tribune, he wrote in 1944 that ‘almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that […]
“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.” Animal Farm (1945) “This high-minded speech of the deputy hackney-coach-horse seemed to electrify all present; and a most touching scene took place, of the […]
“Came home to hear [illegible] Eric Blair is dead.” Jack Common Archival research into the melancholic world of the past, where nearly everyone who lives on the page is long dead, can be incredibly poignant – no matter how long ago the events being recovered took place. Turning the pages of Jack Common’s near illegible […]
“On the spot where we were standing is a small cabin, built of stones loosely piled together, as a shelter for travellers, which in joke has been named “The Castle of Mont Anvert.” An Englishman of the name of Blaire, who is residing at Geneva, has caused a more spacious one to be built at […]
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell The information wrestled from the record of an 18th century Chancery suit (Blair v Drake 1754) involving Orwell’s great-great-grandfather has been crucial for unlocking some previously closed research doors. This one scroll of parchment helped with several pieces of the […]
Raoul Peck’s ambitious new documentary pays homage to George Orwell’s intellectual achievement by exploring contemporary manifestations of the authoritarianism the writer so deplored. Since his premature death from tuberculosis in 1950, Orwell’s novels and essays have become authoritative primers for several generations of readers seeking insight into the dark arts of political propaganda, surveillance and […]