In 1946 George Orwell wrote his "Confessions of a Book Reviewer". We asked new member Peter Chappell to describe life for the aspiring journalist of today * * In a cold but stuffy room littered with pens and charging cables, the figure sits at a crowded table, balancing a glowing laptop on the debris. Small…Read more Confessions of a 2019 Book Reviewer
The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey – a discussion by the author at Five Leaves bookshop, Nottingham. Thursday July 4th 2019. A report by Benedict Cooper George Orwell left London for Catalonia on December 22nd 1936. He fled Barcelona in fear for his and Eileen’s life six months later, hastily across the…Read more ‘The Ministry of Truth’ at Five Leaves Bookshop
A Band of Orwell Devotees Finds Out by Carol Biederstadt As the laws of coincidence would have it, exactly seventy years to the day after George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published, a small band of 20 Orwellites gathered to spend the day paying homage to the writer in the village of Wallington in Hertfordshire,…Read more Where’s Wallington?
by Tom Miller * The only thing the matter with Nineteen Eighty-Four is its title. Though Orwell was probably intelligently inverting the year of the book's creation, nineteen forty-eight, the expression Nineteen Eighty-Four lacks the sting of Brave New World. Airstrip One is a better coinage, because Britain in World War II and the Cold…Read more Timeline: Airstrip One
Fifteen years before the publication of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four his wife Eileen had already written and published a poem about 1984. In an extract from her forthcoming biography, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, author Sylvia Topp describes the poem and the state of the world in which it was published in…Read more ‘End of the Century, 1984’
In 2015 we published an article, an exchange between Richard Young and L J Hurst, on the delays and puzzling editions of John Mair's thriller Never Come Back. Never Come Back had made a big impression on George Orwell when he reviewed it in 1941, and it may have been one of the paranoid…Read more The Difficult Birth of ‘Never Come Back’
as Societies Meet for the First Time * A joint meeting between the George Orwell Society and the H. G. Wells Society is to be held in Fitzroy Square, London, on Friday July 19. The meeting is open to the public – and free. Photograph of H G Wells from Wikipedia Professor Tim Crook, of…Read more Wells/Orwell Relationship under the Spotlight
