Trustees
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Our Patron – Richard Blair
Patron and committee member since 19 April 2011. Became a trustee on registration of the society as a charity on 5 November 2014.
As the adopted son of George Orwell, I am honoured to be invited to be patron of this society. Since there is no blood relationship, I have followed a very different career path. My upbringing and training is in agriculture, followed by a period working for a well known tractor company. Redundancy in the mid-eighties led to a complete change, which involved the ownership of a holiday complex. Following the sale a few years ago I am now fully retired and am in a position to give more time to all things Orwell, including the Orwell Society. I hope that it will provoke, not only light-hearted and serious discussions about Orwell himself, but also about the issues he took passionate interest in.
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Chair – Quentin Kopp
Committee member and responsible for Society events since 9 March 2012. Became a trustee on registration of the society as a charity on 5 November 2014. Elected Chair on 17 April 2021.
Quentin is Chairman of a pioneering company creating a new powerful material principally made of wood. His second career was as an independent Management Consultant focusing on improving business performance through improved development of people and processes and has worked with businesses around the world. He also supervised Masters Students in his areas of expertise at Warwick University. His earlier career was spent in HR and then Managing Director roles in large engineering and clothing groups. Quentin’s father Georges Kopp met his Mother through having been Orwell’s Commanding Officer in the Spanish Civil War.
“I have been a keen reader of Orwell’s work since my teenage years. The clarity of his thought and his lucid expression always impressed me and are an example to all still. At a time when people decided what they thought in relation to their ideology, his clear and independent approach was and remains refreshingly different.”
Secretary – Ian Bloom
Ian became a Trustee and committee member of the Orwell Society in summer 2023 and Secretary in May 2025.
Ian was a senior partner in two London law firms for 25 years specialising in employment, commercial/ company and media law. Following early retirement, he is now a freelance legal consigliere.
Prior to his legal career he worked in publishing and was also a book reviewer (T.R. Fyvel was his literary editor) and feature writer and co-wrote a book on Copyright Law. His articles have appeared in the Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the New Statesman and the London Evening Standard. He has been LBC’s long-time “go-to” media law commentator and has also appeared on Talk TV, Times TV, Radio 5 Live, and Sky News.
He was the producer’s lawyer on several films and television programmes including Shallow Grave; and the tv sports documentaries Class of 92, I Am Bolt and Mo Farah: No Easy Mile.
He is a member of Table Tennis England’s Disciplinary Committee, a commentator for their tv channel and he produced a table tennis documentary film in 2023. He was appointed to the first Premier League Owners and Directors Test: Independent Oversight Panel in April 2023.
‘One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.’ (Benefit of Clergy: some notes on Salvadore Dali (1944))
Treasurer – Demsey Slater
Biography to follow
Education – Bruce Dear
Bruce is retired. He is keeping busy and alert with a Masters in Classics, freelance journalism and writing (mostly about history and football), voracious reading, worrying about Arsenal FC, spending time with his sons, and travelling with his wife Katharine.
His favourite George Orwell quote is a brilliant piece of provocation about football from Orwell’s ‘As I Please’ column of December 1945. It’s a small example of Orwell’s determination always to tell the truth as he saw it – whether you agree with him or not.Orwell was shocked Arsenal fans had booed the referee during their team’s 4-3 loss to Dynamo in a « goodwill » friendly and went on to say:
‘Football [is] a game in which everyone gets hurt, and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.’
Journal – Masha Karp
Journal Editor and trustee since 27 April 2016.
Masha Karp is a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in relations between Russia and the West. She is a translator of “Animal Farm ” into Russian (first published in 2001) and the author of the award winning first Russian biography of Orwell. Masha worked for the BBC World Service for 18 years, she was Russian Features editor from 1997 to 2009.
She is a trustee of “Rights in Russia” NGO and writes on Russian politics and literature for the national press in the UK. Apart from Orwell she has published translations of many writers, including Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Jennings, Alice Munro, Andreas Griffius and Nicolaus Lenau, as well as articles on translation. She is a member of the St Petersburg Writers’ Union and the Literary Translators Guild in Russia and a chair of the Pushkin Club in Britain.
“You can’t understand contemporary politics without Orwell”.
Digital and Research – Les Hurst
Trustee with responsibility for research and digital presence since 25 April 2015.
Although it took some time Les Hurst was finally able to combine his first degree in English with an equivalent qualification in IT when he worked in the back offices of several large media companies for twenty years. For the last fifteen years he has been a bookseller. He has published reviews and criticism on Orwell and others for most of his adult life, and continues to contribute to the British Science Fiction Association and the Shotsmag.co.uk website.
My favourite Orwell quotation is: “Propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book” (The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda, 1941)
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(As at August 2025)