‘I’ve gotta get a typewriter that’s sexier’ - George Orwell at the coal face
A LETTER FROM AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
Late autumn in 1949. A letter arrives on George Orwell’s doormat all the way from California. He might also feel it has come from a long time ago: the writer was one of ...
Perhaps the reason we’re no longer able to see into the future like the great writers of the twentieth century, is that we’re in our own version of what they predicted....
If you pretend that [fascism] is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon (George Orwell, 1936)....
When I claimed recently that Jonathan Jones, the prolific art critic for The Guardian, used the same method as Boris Johnson when writing his articles, I was, of course, indulging in banter. There is no evidence that Jones writes two articles about every exhibition he sees, one in praise of the...
When Andrea Leadsom first came to prominence in the wake of the referendum result, as a possible replacement for David Cameron, was I alone in noticing how she resembled Dame Vera Lynn, the forces’ sweetheart during the war years?...
For some time now, I’ve been preoccupied with eyebrows in a way few men have ever been. Not since the obsessive young man described in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, As You Like It, has anyone been more obsessed than me. It’s not the case that I want to pen woeful ballads on the subject; I...
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Museums are not the unassailably venerable institutions they used to be. Nowadays, they are coming under increasing pressure to give back many of their treasures on the grounds that these were taken away, possibly stolen or bought for a heap of beads, and that they belong to the nations from ...
