Eric Arthur Blair (1903-50), who is better-known to the world as George Orwell, was one of the leading English essayists of the first half of the twentieth century, writing about everything from the Spanish Civil War to the ideal pub to how to make a perfect cup of tea. Of […]
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one […]
‘The Prevention of Literature’ is perhaps George Orwell’s most famous essay defending freedom of expression. Published in January 1946 in Polemic, the essay sees Orwell calling upon intellectuals of all backgrounds and disciplines to stand up against literary censorship of various kinds.
‘Inside the Whale’ is a long essay by George Orwell (1903-50), published in 1940. The title of Orwell’s essay refers to the biblical Book of Jonah, in which the prophet Jonah is swallowed by a great fish (although, as Orwell notes, received wisdom tends to substitute ‘whale’ for ‘fish’).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the famous opening sentence of Orwell’s final novel ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Since those words were first published in 1949, they have joined the pantheon, the literary canon, […]