The Awkward Squaddie by Andy Croft (New Statesman & Society, March 18, 1994). Have you noticed how quiet the Orwell industry is these days? Perhaps in the ten years since "that year" lost its popular resonance, Orwell's reputation hue rather lost its shine...
Bye-Bye, Big Brother by Peter Huber (National Review, August 15, 1994). "From the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - Greetings!" These words were written in 1948 by a lonely, iconoclastic genius of English letters. He was 44 years old and was dying of tuberculosis...
Democracy Sabotaged by Shoddy Speech by Sanford Pinsker (Insight on the News, Oct 21, 1996). "All issues are political issues," George Orwell declared with the same no-nonsense clarity he brought to nearly every sentence he crafted during a long career at the writing desk...
George Orwell by Landon Y. Jones (People Weekly, Jan 9, 1984). He had big feet. His size-12 boots had to be handmade, and George Orwell was sometimes forced to order them from friends in America. A soldier who met him in the trenches during the Spanish Civil War was astounded: He'd "never seen boots that were so large, clogged in mud"...
George Orwell and the Big Cannibal Critics by Jonah Raskin (Monthly Review, May 1983). Has the cultural atmosphere of the Cold War come back to haunt us? One would think so from reading Irving Howe's "Was Orwell Right?", Norman Podhoretz' "If Orwell Were Alive Today' , and E.L. Doctorow's "One the Brink of 1984"...
The Hell of Nineteen Eighty-Four by Malcolm Pittock (Essays in Criticism, April 1997). Did Orwell realise quite what he had done in Nineteen Eighty-Four? His post-publication glosses on its meaning reveal either blankness or bad faith even about its contemporary political implications...
Henry Miller and George Orwell by Nancy Caldwell Sorel (The Atlantic Monthly, Sept 1995) When, late in December of 1936, George Orwell stopped over in Paris on his way to Spain to fight for the Loyalist cause, the only person he took time to see was the American expatriate Henry Miller...
In Search of Orwell's Scottish Retreat by Sylvia Topp (The North American Review, March-April 1994). Ever since I fell in love with George Orwell I've been fascinated by his choice of a remote Scottish island named Jura as his refuge from being "constantly smothered under journalism" in London...
The Only Heir Scarcely Knew his Adoptive Father by People Weekly (People Weekly, Jan 9, 1984). His pastimes are playing squash, tending roses and attending Scottish country dance classes. He earns his living writing sales manuals. Few know that the unassuming Richard Blair is George Orwell's adopted son and sole beneficiary...
Orwell and Bohemia by Geoffrey Heptonstall (Contemporary Review, April 1994). In Cyril Connolly, George Orwell had a lifelong friend -- from early days at school until forty years on when Orwell died in 1950 in the week that the last edition of Connolly's magazine Horizon came out...
Orwell and Patriotism by John Rossi (Contemporary Review, August 1992). George Orwell loved to shock his readers. One has only to look at the opening sentences of his essays for examples of this. 'As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later'...'
Orwell Now by Robert Pearce (History Today, October 1997). Orwell has long fascinated historians. It is probably true to say that the four volumes of The Collected Essays, journalism and Letters of George Orwell, published by Penguin in 1970, are among the most well-thumbed paperbacks on many modem historians' shelves...
Orwell: The Authorized Biography (review) by Michael Scammell (The New Republic, June 15, 1992). Few writers of this century have been as thoroughly canonized as George Orwell. He is one of that very small group whose names have been turned into household adjectives...
Orwell: The Lost Writings (reviews) by George Woodcock (The New Leader, Sept 9, 1985); and Jeffrey Meyers (National Review, Nov 29, 1985). One reads this book with a sinking heart, yet with a morbid kind of fascination...
Orwell: The War Commentaries (review) by Jeffrey Meyers (National Review, March 13, 1987). Several years ago the amateur scholar, W. J. West, discovered a large cache of Orwell papers in the British Broadcasting Company archives in Reading, England....
The Politics of Literary Reputation (reviews) by Joseph Sobran (National Review, June 30, 1989); and Paul Berman (The New Republic, March 12, 1990). I have always enjoyed reading George Orwell, except for his fiction, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. That book is a great idea, weakly executed, and the popular misunderstanding of it-the assumption that it was a prediction-gave it its popularity...
Spilling the Beans in Paris and London by Henri Astier (Contemporary Review, June 1994). Anglo-Saxon readers don't need to be reminded who George Orwell is, but a few words of introduction might help in the case of Jean-Francois Revel...
Stone Pastorals: Three Men on the Side of the Horses by Jared C. Lobdell (Extrapolation, Winter 1996). Northrop Frye has pointed out the congruence between and among seasons, cityscapes, and the four great patterns or mythoi of literature: spring, village, and comedy; summer, country-town, and romance; autumn, baroque city, and tragedy; winter, megalopolis, and satire...
Where He Wrote: Periodicals and the Essays of George Orwell by Peter Marks (Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1995). George Orwell has attained something akin to the status of a cultural icon, ironic given the myth of him as an iconoclast...