George Orwell | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

- Search for:
0
0

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, [11] 36; Down and Out in Paris and London, [21] 7; Burmese Days, [40] 75; Essays, [56] 58; Animal Farm, [65] 49; Nineteen Eighty-Four, [69] 26

Browse articles

Episode 47: Aspects of Orwell

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

D. J. Taylor, literary critic, novelist and Whitbread Prize-winning author of the definitive Orwell: The Life (2003) and its highly acclaimed sequel The New Life (2023), and Masha Karp, Orwell scholar, former Russian features editor at the BBC World Service…

The Nightmare of Room 101

Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. That first arresting sentence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four transports us immediately into a world that is real enough (the swirl of gritty dust, the acidic sickly gin, the smell of boiled cabbage) but is also alien and fantastic. Even now, in the age of the 24-hour clock, that number thirteen startles you, for no clock ever does physically strike thirteen, and its undercurrent of unluckiness adds to the sense of unease. It’s one of the best opening sentences I’ve ever read.

Betrayals

Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Animal Farm

I have a Russian wife. We work together – articles, talks, translations, books, to keep the wolf from the door. Sometimes, when a bigger than usual energy bill slides through the letterbox, or the car breaks down or the tax-man cometh, one of us will look at the other with a rueful grin and say: ‘The solution as I see it, Comrade, is to work harder.’ It’s a direct quotation from Animal Farm (1945) and the character we are quoting is the big carthorse Boxer, eighteen hands high, and the stalwart representative of the proletariat in George Orwell’s book.

The Road to Room 101

Gordon Bowker on George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Every time I go into one of those old-fashioned second-hand bookshops – the ones with rows of leather-bound copies of Punch and shelves full of long-expired novels and the sweet smell of decaying paper pervading the air – I think of Gordon Comstock, George Orwell’s anti-hero in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Poor Gordon, an advertising dropout and aspiring poet who is scraping a living as an assistant in such a bookshop, is forever bemoaning a world ruled by ‘the Money God’ rather than the Muses.

An Extraordinary Ordinary Bloke

Brandon Robshaw on the essays of George Orwell

The Orwell of the essays has a pungent literary personality. He’s dauntingly knowledgeable, decided in his views and trenchant in their expression, a non-sufferer of fools, an enemy of pretension and hypocrisy; yet withal humane, reasonable, decent. He writes as if he’s just an ordinary bloke – yet not an ordinary ordinary bloke, but an exceptionally well-read, politically aware, sensitive and intelligent ordinary bloke with wide-ranging interests and a view on everything.

Pox Britannica

Sue Gee on George Orwell, Burmese Days

In November 1922, George Orwell (or Eric Blair, as he was then) arrived in Burma, to take up a post with the Indian Imperial Police. He was 19, not long out of Eton, which he had attended on a scholarship; his family could not afford to send him to university. He moved about: from hill station to frontier outpost, to the outskirts of Rangoon, eventually posted to the town of Katha, in Upper Burma. It was on this remote place that he based the town of Kyauktada, the setting for his first novel, Burmese Days. It was published in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1934, and then, in 1935, in London, by Victor Gollancz, who had – needlessly – been afraid of libel.

All Washed Up

Christopher Robbins on George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I lived in Copenhagen where I was registered with the Foreign Ministry as correspondent for The Times. But I made my living washing dishes. The paper paid by the line and used so little of my copy that I was forced to find illegal work as a scullion in one of the city’s less elegant restaurants. And it was during this time, morbidly attracted by the title, that I found a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London.

Buy related issues of Slightly Foxed