Bernard Crick is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, London. At the beginning of the summer he gave the first George Orwell Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Penguin Books, at the University of London’s Extra-Mural Department. ‘Orwell and Biography’ is a shortened version of this lecture.
In one sense, nothing has changed. As we move into the Era of Foot, the Labour Party remains what it always was: a coalition of trade unions, working-class institutions and middle-class intellectuals (or men and women who have become middle-class by rising up).
If you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’...
Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a...
Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial....
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