George Orwell Always in the News Number 23

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In response to (among others) ‘What different world maps get right – and what they get wrong’ (BBC 5^th September 2026):

Two extracts from George Orwell’s ‘As I Please’ column

Tribune, 11^th February 1944

[M]aps are tricky things, to be regarded with the same suspicion as photographs and statistics. It is an interesting minor manifestation of nationalism that every nation colours itself red on the map. There is also a tendency to make yourself look bigger than you are, which is possible without actual forgery since every projection of the earth as a flat surface distorts some part or other.

If you ask any circle of people (I should particularly like to do this with the members of the House of Commons) to draw a map of Europe from memory, you get some surprising results. Any Government which genuinely cared about education would see to it that a globe map, at present an expensive rarity, was accessible to every schoolchild. Without some notion of which country is next to which, and which is the quickest route from one place to another, and where a ship can be bombed from shore, and where it can’t, it is difficult to see what value the average citizen’s views on foreign policy can have.