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“... people in many other categories were and are routinely stripped of rights. Heller-Roazen refers to George Orwell, who in ‘How the Poor Die’ recounted his treatment as an indigent ‘specimen’ in a charity hospital in France in 1921, and to the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose dissertation in 1953 concerned the ‘civil inattention’ practised on ...”

“... of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At least not necessarily more tragic or wasted than ...”

“... of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to Wakefield, where George Gissing is not commemorated as fully as he might be – too ‘grim’, perhaps, and too heavily challenged, like many formerly industrial towns and all socialist novelists, for a happy ending. McKie’s purpose is not so much to deny that present-day ...”

“... a wall and ‘took off her sopping knickers’. When he got her onto the bed, he rang Sonia Orwell, who arrived to take charge of the situation: ‘For God’s sake, David,’ Mrs Orwell said, ‘don’t you know when someone’s drunk?’ A few days later, he again visited Jean Rhys, who in the meantime had been ...”

“... he says as if coining the thought for the first time that ‘the year 1994 is more like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than the real 1984 was. In 1994, we are beginning to understand the full force of the Orwellian slogan, “Peace Means War.” ’ Oh, please. In the first place, the famous Ministry of Truth slogan was ‘War Is Peace.’ In the ...”

“... even if they did not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated ...”

“... that would be acceptable to the urban poor.’ This is about as accurate as referring to George Orwell as a Marxist. It is true, however, that Shariati sought out the common ground between Marxist activism and Islamic radicalism, and this certainly helped forge the links between leftists and Khomeinists without which the revolution could not ...”

“... We have one more thing: the most nerve-straining title of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving ...”

“... girlfriends and wives (some of them bigamous).Back in 1980, Bernard Crick began his Life of George Orwell by imploring English biographers to be honest, to confess when they didn’t know something about their subject instead of veering off into fiction. They took little notice. Schneer is endearingly open about the holes in the exceedingly ...”

“... dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’. British readers will remember that George Orwell, some eighty years later, suggested in his blunt, offensive way that Americans ought to add to this proposition: ‘not counting niggers’. It would be quite wrong, of course, to use Orwell’s sarcasm ...”

“... the country to its true identity and rid it of the evils of ‘foreign’, i.e. liberal, ideas. As George Orwell observed at the time, ‘the military mutiny ... was an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.’ But by 1975 there were few Spaniards outside the narrow world of the Armed Forces who were still pining for the 16th ...”

“... be – so that the millennial apocalypse be fulfilled.Somewhat analogous has been the impact of George Orwell’s most famous book. For the past thirty-five years, no one could so much as mention the date 1984 without triggering off, deliberately or involuntarily, a reference to the apocalyptic horrors of Airstrip One. That era is now at an ...”

“... self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying ...”

“... allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated hyperbole, praised Pritchett’s criticism by saying ...”

“... hard and Muggeridge had every excuse to do what paid the bills. It is even possible to imagine George Orwell doing the same – but not to imagine him not worying about it, or regarding such an injunction as good advice. No real writer can think of his writing as something separated from his essential being. It shouldn’t be necessary to state such ...”