Orwell Society
@Orwell_Society
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*The Orwell Society aims to promote the understanding and appreciation of the life and work of George Orwell (1903-1950). It is a registered charity in the UK.*
Henley on Thames
Joined June 2011
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Richard Blair, son of George Orwell, Patron of
@Orwell_Society
, stands in the Placa de George Orwell, Barcelona, today, May 13th.
#Orwell
#SCW
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This is from the Introduction George Orwell wrote for 'Animal Farm'. If your copy does not have it then it is available to read on the Orwell Prize website:
“These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
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Tonight on BBC 2 television, the film 'Mr Jones' about the Welsh journalist who realised the nature and extent of the Ukrainian famine long before anyone else.
Not a documentary - contains some license with events.
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Here is our reply in 2017 when someone asked
@Orwell_Society
about this fake quotation.
As an example of how fake quotations survive, this reply is on the 4th page of the search results. Everything before treats it as true.
@MattBinder
@Orwell_Society
I'd love an article from you on your website dealing with this one :)
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Author of more than 200 books for children and adults,
@MichaelRosenYes
has won the 2023 PEN Pinter prize for what judges called a “fearless” body of work that provides a “lesson in humanity.”
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Richard Blair, son of George Orwell and Patron of
@Orwell_Society
in Sutton Courtenay today, reading at his father's graveside. It is the 120th anniversary of Orwell's birth.
The Orwell Society's commemorations began Friday and continued until today. Thanks to all participants.
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On this day, 26th August 1946, George Orwell's Animal Farm was first published in the USA.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” - George Orwell, Animal Farm
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Many happy returns, Richard Blair, patron of the Orwell Society, son of George Orwell, born eighty years ago today.
The age of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and of Richard Blair are similar. Probably not a coincidence.
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'...that night I left for Spain. The train, a slow one, was packed with Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, all bound on the same mission... as we crawled across southern France, every peasant working in the fields turned round, stood solemnly upright and gave the anti-Fascist salute.'
Memorial commemorating volunteers from Luxembourg who fought in the International Brigades. 102 Luxembourgers fought against fascism in Spain, I think highest in terms of population for any state. Switzerland probably 2nd. Scotland up their as a country. Paris my guess as a city
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George Orwell’s son on why Nineteen Eighty-Four still resonates 70 years on: "authorities are saying it’s only for our safety and security. That ghastly phrase that they use really makes my teeth grind."
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The manuscript of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' changed a lot, but the three slogans of the party never changed. Orwell was sure of those.
George Orwell’in el yazısıyla yazdığı "1984" romanının taslağı. Üzerinde "Savaş barıştır, Özgürlük köleliktir, Cahillik güçtür." Yazısı...
#georgeOrwell
#
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"He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984."
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Orwell on Sheffield: 'Once I halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke.'
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"We don't send our children to school to have ideas put into their heads. I'm speaking for all the parents in saying this."
George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter (Chapter 4, Part 4). 1935
Orwell fearlessly satirizes conservative parental intervention into school reading material in his 1935 novel A CLERGYMAN’S DAUGHTER. In this scene the parents are outraged that their children have read Macbeth and picked up the word “womb.”
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We regret to announce the death of Dione Venables, the person almost alone responsible for the founding of the Orwell Society.
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'Who's That Looking Over Your Shoulder?' Book reviews by
@MargaretAtwood
: eight books on snooping in its many forms, including Rebecca Solnit's new book on George Orwell.
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"A 1930s novel that was acclaimed by George Orwell and WH Auden before being forgotten for decades is to be republished... by Vintage next March."
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Orwell: The New Life by
@djtaylorwriter
has received many appreciative reviews. We have links to a good number of them on
@Orwell_Society
website.
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Here's Orwell's complete letter to Mr Willmett, who'd asked him about totalitarianism:
In 1944 George Orwell explained in a letter his motivation for writing 1984. Still relevant today.
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Pros and Contras of modern life.
Plaça George Orwell Barcelona
Photographed by Quentin Kopp, son of George Orwell's Commander in Spain, Georges Kopp, May 2024.
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Richard Blair, son of George
#Orwell
, found himself in an even more literal situation earlier this year when he went to talk to an Orwell Youth Prize event at Portsmouth University.
Wait a minute - I'm in room 101. Are... are BEDS my greatest fear?
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George Orwell died in the small hours of the morning on 21st January 1950.
D J Taylor describes the last days of Orwell's life.
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Richard Blair, son of George Orwell and Patron of the Orwell Society, was pleased to visit Small Isles School on the Isle of Jura this week.
Richard was raised by his father on Jura between 1945 and 1949.
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As Orwell put it, "Why is the goose-step not used in England?... It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army."
@Orwell_Society
In
@AndrewMarr9
's book The History of Modern Britain he said that one of the reason's we have never had an extremist govt is because we "laugh at men in silly uniforms."
I'm more to have a liberal govt you need a liberal people.
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On this day in the USA, 26th August 1946, George Orwell's Animal Farm was first published.
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"The book needs what Lewis gives it, which is a biography of Orwell and the importance of each place, told chronologically."
And there's more! New on
@Orwell_Society
website.
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"... Orwell seems to have been so absorbed in the novel [Ulysses] to the point where he was consciously borrowing the dialogue to attack his own work."
Ron Batemen on George Orwell, James Joyce and Marilyn Monroe. New on the OS website.
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If you can't get out to buy a paperback, it is available to read on the Orwell Prize website: Recommended by
@billybragg
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"My father was a great patriot. A great defender of his country and he was also a critic of both sides of the political debate. He would criticise both left and right."
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Ultimately.
George Orwell: "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for."
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George
#Orwell
's "flat in Kilburn was demolished by a doodlebug. His friend Inez Holden remembered him scrabbling among the bomb-rubble to salvage his books and trundling them in a wheelbarrow ... during his lunch breaks"
@gill_winn
@gladlib
But the transportation of books from castle to library by barrow was a very moving and powerful and humbling act. "What man", Gladstone wrote, "who really loves his books delegates to any other human being, as long as there is breath in his body, the office of introducing them
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"A kind, effusive and unassuming man, he was much esteemed by other Orwellians for his readiness to offer help and encouragement"
D J Taylor on Professor Peter Davison, editor of the Complete Works of George Orwell
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"Any sort of situation where you are being fed disinformation, which can come from either left or right, ... They want to guide you down the path they want to take you. And I would suggest that is what has become 'Orwellian'".
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Coming this month in paperback, 'Orwell: The New Life' by
@djtaylorwriter
Author’s copies just arrived. Superb production job by
@LittBrownUK
Published 21 March.
@Orwell_Society
@TheOrwellPrize
@CBGBooks
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During World War II George Orwell looked back to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and considered their implications for the future. He wrote an essay about the past and the prospective:-
#OtD
21 Jan 1950 George Orwell, celebrated British author and socialist who fought against the fascists in the Spanish civil war, died. More on the Spanish Civil War in our podcast here:
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"... in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness."
George Orwell on 'Pleasure Spots' in 1946
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There was a need ...
"I used to drag my Hugo's dictionary out of my pocket and start on him in my villainous Spanish: 'Yo sé manejar fusil. No sé manejar ametralladora. Quiero apprender ametralladora. Quándo vamos apprender ametralladora?'"
(Homage to Catalonia)
English-Spanish Grammar. Compiled and edited by “The Volunteer for Liberty Organ” of the International Brigades. Barcelona, 1938.
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Born on this day in 1903 -
#GeorgeOrwell
@RSLiterature
@Orwell_Society
@BC_EnglishDept
@BcTeaching
@bchistory_
@LibraryofBham
@heath_kings
@allontheboard
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The serial on BBC Radio 4 - George Orwell's Coming Up For Air
As WW2 approaches a man who can see what is coming tries to escape by re-visiting his past.
This week and next week.
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From Orwell's proposed Introduction to Animal Farm, a defence of the freedom of the press, which only appeared long after he died. Available to read on the Orwell Prize website:
Humanist author, George Orwell, died of tuberculosis
#OnThisDay
in 1950 – he was only 46 years old.
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The numbers from Spain were horrific. Nick Lloyd
@Civil_War_Spain
will know them.
In addition to Spain itself, once the Nazis controlled Europe they rounded up and murdered even more Spanish republicans on Franco's behalf.
@Orwell_Society
According to historians of genocide, at least 200,000 people died in Franco's "White Terror" between 1936 & 1946. Supposedly Spain has the second highest number of mass graves, second only to Cambodia. Is this a correct or reasonable claim?
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On
#NationalBookLoversDay
remember Booklovers' Corner.
"The novelist Peter Vansittart (1920–) has described meeting Orwell when, as a schoolboy, he went to Booklovers’ Corner to purchase A Damsel in Distress, but Orwell tried to persuade him to buy Trader Horn in Madagascar."
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George Orwell died
#OTD
, 21 January 1950.
"Some bad news: George Orwell is dead... He was one of the very few men with whom I shared something."
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From George Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm (1947)
Available to read on the Orwell Prize website.
“Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.”
George Orwell, 1947.
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George Orwell's Animal Farm was published on this day 17th August 1945:
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Despite its not being printed again after 1937 until Penguin brought out their paperback edition in 1962 (25 years) the name and importance of The Road to Wigan Pier never faded.
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On this day, April 25 1938, George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia was published. He had had to change publisher in order to see it in print.
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George Orwell died early in the morning of January 21st 1950 in University College Hospital, London.
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Animal Farm at 75: How the covers have changed through the decades
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There are some interesting influences on George
#Orwell
's 'Coming Up For Air', including a couple of ghastly murders. Read about the background here:
Saturday afternoon spent in the company of George Bowling. I've decided to reread Orwell (last time was the 90s), novels and essays, over the next couple of months and I'm starting here. This is a cracking good read.
@Orwell_Society
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"The important thing to remember about Orwell was that he wasn't famous until four years before he died."
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Sunday 25th June 2023 was the 120th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell. The Orwell Society commemoration occupied three days with talks, events and visits, as our website describes (including the Orwell birthday cake!):
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Our thanks to Fred Cubbage for this recent photograph of the grave of George Orwell in Sutton Courtenay Churchyard, and our thanks to John Napper who maintains the grounds so perfectly.
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"I have seldom met people with more natural decency." George
#Orwell
said of his hosts in Sheffield.
His diary entry ends with the recipe for fruit loaf.
You would have thought that
#Waterstones
in
#Sheffield
of all places would mention how rude
#GeorgeIrwell
was about the place in The Road To Wigan Pier (can thoroughly recommend it, despite dissing my hometown)
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"Dylan Thomas, who in his queer way is certainly something out of the common. He has been a watched pot from a very early age and it is not quite certain that he has ever boiled, but there is no question about his gift for extracting sheer music from words."
George
#Orwell
, 1940
To begin at the beginning....
Today is the 109th anniversary of the birth of Dylan Thomas
Happy Birthday Dylan!
Find out more about Dylan Thomas 📷📷
#DylanThomas
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George Orwell started to make notes for a novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four during the Second World War. His notebooks are kept in the Orwell Archive at University College London.
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Huesca brinda un homenaje histórico a George Orwell: el café está servido
El Parque Miguel Servet acoge ya una escultura tributo al escritor, realizada por el artista oscense Javier Sauras
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George Orwell - very tall figure at the back of the column (to left of photograph).
Dec 30 1936 - George Orwell enlists in the POUM militia to fight fascism during Spanish Civil War.
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We are pleased to announce that a last part of the construction of the new Orwell Society website is now complete with the transfer of the Memoirs of Professor Peter Davison, editor of The Complete Works of George Orwell.
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"I have just finished a novel I have been tinkering about with since the summer of 1947. I would have finished it six months ago if I had been well. I am not pleased with it, but I think it is a good idea."
George Orwell's letter to Malcolm Muggeridge 4 December 1948.
4 December 1948. George Orwell completed the final draft of his landmark futuristic novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, which depicts a totalitarian tyranny ruled by “Big Brother” and supported by a pervasive secret police operating blanket surveillance of the entire population.
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This is the room in which George Orwell sat with the official statistics for the town and the country as a whole, as he researched The Road to Wigan Pier. One of the reasons that the book has persisted is that Orwell melded the personal with the political as few others could.
In this beautiful
#Wigan
library, we just celebrated the 85th anniversary of George Orwell's ground-breaking piece of social journalism, The Road to Wigan Pier. Thanks to
@Orwell_Society
and all the speakers for an amazing weekend. 1/6
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While George Orwell lived there he turned that green field into a vegetable garden. He was a very practically minded man.
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Here is
#Orwell
's night in the cells:
Dr Seaber found the original court documents. The value of research among public records.
Every year my class on Orwell and non-literary archives always seems the most fun students have with me all year, which makes me very happy.
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Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead, while he worked at Booklover's Corner on South End Green.
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"What is Chaplin’s peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West."
George Orwell reviewed The Great Dictator, 21 Dec 1940
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'unemployed miners robbing the “dirt-train,” or, as they call it, “scrambling for the coal.” A most astonishing sight. ' (20 Feb 1936). McCullin was 35 years later. Now, is there any coal to gather?
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Our statement on the death of “unparalleled” Orwell academic and editor Professor Peter Davison.
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"It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the 'beehive state', which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark."
George
#Orwell
, The Road to Wigan Pier, chapter 12
Reading again "Franquismo S.A" by
@AntonioMaestre
This is a devastating critique of the wholesale plunder of those who won the war in Spain+ Francoist origins of Spain's business elite today and their fortunes resting on the spoils of Franco's victory in 1939. Highly recommended
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A man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pub
#OTD
8 June 1949
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During the Orwell Society's visit to Spain in May we met Aurelia Quinto Aznar, the daughter of the officer in the Sam Brown Belt in the famous Lenin Barracks photo.
Here with Richard Blair, son of George Orwell, and Quentin Kopp, son of Orwell's commander in Spain, Georges Kopp.
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Eric Blair, later to become George Orwell, was 11 years old when he wrote "Awake! Young Men Of England" and the First World War had not reached its first Christmas.
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And continues 'It means that the issue of class, as distinct from mere economic status, has got to be faced more realistically than it is being faced at present.' (Wigan Pier chapter 13)
“It is fatal to let the ordinary inquirer get away with the idea that being a Socialist means wearing sandals & burbling about dialectical materialism. You have got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings, or the game is up.”
George Orwell
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Perhaps the most important 4 volume set that Penguin have ever published. The Orwell Society had a great talk from Timothy Garton Ash on the value he attributed to his.
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Orwell on The Cost Of Letters:
90 years ago, Virginia Woolf stated that a woman needed a room of her own and £500 a year in order to write. Last year, for
#DallowayDay
2019, the RSL launched the 'A Room Of My Own Report’ on what writers need to flourish today. Read the full report:
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"This year is the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death and the 150th of Charles Dickens’s....The double-anniversary ... meant little to me until the virus broke. All of a sudden, they serve as a neat contrast of worldviews."
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Tonight, BBC 2, 9pm
George Orwell's colleague, Una Marson
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"Ulysses is the more original book and the more interesting to professional writers, but it would not be surprising if in the long run Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist came to be rated above it."
George Orwell, 1944
‘Modern Novels’ by Virginia Woolf was published in the Times Literary Supplement OTD in 1919. She referenced A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, which was then appearing in the Little Review.
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We regret to announce the death of Henry Dakin, nephew of George Orwell, at the age of 94.
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"Saturday contemporary Wigan writers will share their stories at The Fire Within HQ 1-2pm. Free Entry"
70 years ago this week George Orwell published 1984
@Orwell_Society
His compelling words inspired
#TheFireWithin
as we explored Wigan’s magnificent past, present and future. This Saturday contemporary Wigan writers will share their stories at The Fire Within HQ 1-2pm Free Entry
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George Orwell's first experiences inside a council house - 1936. From his Wigan Pier diary:
"Kennan also lives in a decent Corporation house"
I wonder if it was ever a joyful family home before the middle class got hold of it. (From the Sunday Times.)
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The Orwell Society is pleased to announce that George Orwell’s personal archive has been added to the UNESCO register.
The archive is held at University College London.
UCL Press Release:
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The Fire Within Exhibition.
An absolute honour to share
#TheFireWithin
exhibition with George Orwell’s son Richard Blair and
@Orwell_Society
today. George Orwell was a fundamental inspiration as we wrote The Fire Within Manifesto. See his new biometric portrait Mon-Sat 11am-3pm
@GalleriesWigan
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Vive La France Libre
80 years ago this week George Orwell explained to the world the importance of Bastille Day, July 14th, in France.
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'What emerges from reading Orwell and Russia is just how much was known about the inner workings of the Soviet Union as early as 1931.'
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"... broadcast speeches and news bulletins make no impression on the average listener, because they are uttered in stilted bookish language and, incidentally, in an upper-class accent."
George Orwell, 1944
In 1967 John Reith, the first ever Director General of the BBC, spoke to Malcolm Muggeridge about the "BBC accent". Reith defended his decision to instruct BBC broadcasters to speak in a rather artificial manner, as opposed to their own local dialects.
#BBC100
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A CP member in Brazil adversely criticises "Animal Farm. In this book, George Orwell expresses aristocratic contempt towards the people, the working class."
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"When [Martin] Amis worked on the [New] Statesman as literary editor in the late 1970s, he was baffled by and found comical the political commitment of his friends and fellow staffers..."
"After Orwell
We are missing a British writer to whom we can turn"
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Nineteen Eighty-Four can be an easy read, but the ideas it explores are complex. It took a lot of working out and re-writing to even approach what Orwell wanted it to be.
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"Eileen Blair, the wife of journalist and author George Orwell, worked here at Senate House during the war, and it became the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's dystopian novel..."
Our Bloomsbury home looks so different today! Would you recognise the site of Senate House from these 1933 clips?
Get the full story behind Senate House’s creation at our public exhibition ‘Charles Holden’s Master Plan’ from 17 January:
#HoldensMasterPlan
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"Imagine living in the property which Geroge Orwell used to frequent for a pint or two to get the juices flowing, when he lived next door in the late 1930s."
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Germano Facetti did the big three dystopias for Penguin.
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Professor Peter Davision, editor of the Complete Works of George Orwell, passed his library to the Orwell Society, who have put it on permanent loan in Wigan. This makes Wigan a major centre for researchers on George Orwell, politics, and social investigation.
The Peter Davison collection of George Orwell's works will be housed at
@WiganMuseum
indefinitely. Richard Blair, Orwell's son & patron of The Orwell Society, signed a contract giving the museum and the council responsibility of the 200-book collection.
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The first English language translation of 'We' was only available in the USA. When George
#Orwell
read it in late 1945 he read a French translation.
Here is what he wrote:
WE - the novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin that inspired 1984 and the emergence of the genre of dystopian fiction.
It was first published in English translation in 1924 and it has to be said- it's an absolutely bonkers book, written in breathless euphoric poetic prose.
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The grave of Bob Smillie has been discovered by Mariado Hinojosa, a Spanish researcher. We will release more information asap, we are delighted to hear this news. A suitable event will be organised which we hope Bob’s family members will be able to attend in 2018.
@IBMT_SCW
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'[It] seems to be a fixed rule in London: whenever you do by some chance have a decent vista, block it up with the ugliest statue you can find.' 21 December 1943
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