Polemic – Covers and Contents
Polemic magazine was published for eight issues post-World War Two. The editor was Humphrey Slater. George Orwell’s name appeared as a member of the Editorial Board. From the third issue it carried a strap-line promising payment of five guineas (£5.5.0 or £5.25p) per thousand words. * Issue One contained George Orwell’s ‘Notes on Nationalism’ … Read more.
Review: Forged in Spain
Richard Baxell is the highly acclaimed author of a number of books and articles on the British Volunteers who fought in Spain. His Unlikely Warriors, was short-listed for the 2013 Political Book Awards’ political history book of the year. He was also the Chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) for a number… Read more.
Good, Modern and Basic English
George Orwell had completed ‘Politics and the English Language’, his analysis of good and bad language use, with their concomitants of successful and poor thinking, by December 1945. It appeared in Horizon magazine in April 1946, and was reprinted shortly after in the USA, and in abridged forms in Britain. In one section Orwell provides… Read more.
Walpoling Activities
* Introduction. In his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale” George Orwell wrote: Even more than at most times the big shots of literary journalism were busy pretending that the age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire ruled the ‘London Mercury’, Gibbs and Walpole were the gods of the lending libraries, there was a cult… Read more.
The cultural icon of today – ‘Orwell Today’
Let us also be clear: Orwell was far from being a saint nor the entirely decent chap he is constantly portrayed as. There was a sadistic, misogynistic, permanent public school boy side to his personality. His attitudes to women were, indeed, pretty dodgy: and his constant affairs during his marriage may well have contributed to the sudden death of his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, in 1945 from a broken heart. Orwell certainly had many secrets: perhaps this was why he stressed in his will that no biography of him should ever be written…. Read more.
One Georgie Orwell @ Greenwich Theatre
Attending a first night of a new musical play is exciting enough, but being there for the last night has more poignancy because it has either been a success or a failure. It was, on the particular last evening of our visit, immediately apparent from both the cast and the audience at the Greenwich Theatre that this three-night musical production has been an unqualified success – and will be travelling onwards…. Read more.
Orwell, Kipling and Empire
One of the greatest of modern British writers was an Englishman who was born in India. He was privately educated in England, did not go to university, and returned to the East to work after leaving school. Empire, and the relation between those in authority and those under authority, became one of the principal… Read more.
George Orwell’s Henley chapel tenancy secured, opens 2012
Pete Burness-Smith reports that the ‘George Orwell’s Henley’ chapel tenancy has been secured and will be opened in early 2012 and also that the first annual Animal Farmyard was “a great success on Thursday night at The Kenton Theatre in Henley-on-Thames. The evening was planned to celebrate and financially support that community project and to make… Read more.
