Why Orwell Matters
Christopher Hitchens
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0465030505
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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(and one might pause here to give credit to Eton College for accommodating both him and George Orwell in the same intake). The only false note in such a finely wrought paragraph comes with the invocation of the ‘saint’; unsought and indeed repudiated by Orwell and the cause of much of the irrational resentment against his name. With David Astor’s patrician assistance, Orwell’s body was later laid in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire, a patch of ‘deep England’, deep enough indeed.
A number of polemical writers — my Tory brother Peter among them — began to say that English was a tongue in which it was easier to tell the truth than it was to tell a lie. Peter told me when I pressed him that he thought he had annexed this notion from a novel by Simon Raven. He later changed his mind about this, but either or both of them might have drawn the idea, even subliminally, from another common source:Speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned.
Men: Orwell on Beastliness’ to the Royal Society of Literature. She began by remarking upon the repetitive use of the word ‘beastly’, both in his fiction and in his essays. It was evidently a childhood term from which he never parted company. Ms Drabble correctly observed that the word was commonplace in middle-class slang in her own childhood; it was still current if slightly archaic when I was a schoolboy and it meant anything disgusting or boring (‘that beastly film’), or anything unkind — as.
Uphold all these positions, and in that way, simultaneously? I choose a representative quotation from Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s book, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, a history of the ‘Information Research Department’ (IRD) of the British Foreign Office:George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body-blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he had cooperated closely with IRD’s Cold Warriors, even offering his own blacklist of eighty-six Communist.
Contributions to a magazine in which he could sense a general softness on Stalin. In 1948, Wallace’s campaign for the American presidency probably ruined and compromised the American Left for a generation, because of his reliance on Communist Party endorsement and organization. Veteran leftist critics of the Truman administration, notably 1. F. Stone, were mentally and morally tough enough to point this out at the time. All too much has been made of this relatively trivial episode, the last.