Wednesday, 21st January

Today in 1950...

"The death of British novelist, George Orwell"

George Orwell at work. Note the dangling ciggy.

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Motihari, Bengal on the 25th June 1903. He died at 46, of tuberculosis.

Most of today's entry will draw on materials available on george-orwell.org, a terrific site which publishes all of Orwell's published works, now out of copyright and in the public domain.

Although Orwell is most remembered for his novels (1984, Animal Farm, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, etc), he was in his lifetime a respected journalist, essayist, a fighter of Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (he was wounded in action, you can read his account of his getting shot here). The website has all these essays, but in the spirit of helpfulness I'll put links to a few of them right here:

Such, Such Were The Joys
Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier

Bookshop Memories
"In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money"

Down The Mine
"You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on
the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower."

Marrakech
"Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce"

Why I Write
"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of
partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it
because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing"

Other links:

Wikipedia biography
- a Wikipedia biography! Be sure to click on the link to "Orwell's List" - a little bit of posthumous controversy for laughs!

Orwell's Diary
- Diaries from Orwell's time convalescing in Marrakech. One egg! Two eggs! Three eggs! Four eggs!!!

And now a silly quote...

"The test of good manners: to bear patiently with bad ones"


Ibn Gabriol, I think...