"Ultimately, Too Many Otherwise Persuadable Voters Have Become Convinced That Democrats Neither Understand Nor Reflect Their Values"

"In the most provocative segment of the entire book, Orwell also cites 'the horrible, the really disquieting prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.' And he notes the prospectus for a summer Socialist school in which attendees are asked if they prefer a vegetarian diet."

Jeff Greenfield at Politico writes about "How Orwell Diagnosed Democrats' Culture War Problem Decades Ago."

And Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot offer to "Fix the Democratic Brand."

"For Members of the Labour Party, Which Used to Employ Its Author, It Should Be Essential Reading"

"Stears sees a parallel between the problems of our own dysfunctional politics and that of the interwar years. And he sees a solution in a return, precisely, to the vision of Orwell, Priestley, Thomas and their colleagues. Instead of pursuing a populist 'class war', he calls for us to come together again as communities, and build what the American political thinker Danielle Allen calls 'a connected society'."

Seamus Flaherty at Spiked reviews Marc Stears's Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again.

"In Our Own Era of 'Fake News' and 'Alternative Facts,' the Need for Clearer, Simpler Language Is as Great as It Was in 1946"

"Fellow teachers, assign Orwell's famous essay on politics and language if your aim is to promote cultural literacy and critical thinking, or to present a classic example of the plain style, or to discuss the niceties of good versus bad usage. But if you're seeking to improve the literary skills of beginning student writers, don't start with Orwell's list of strictures or advise them to imitate the deceptive simplicity of Orwell's own style."

John Rodden at Commonweal wonders if beginning undergraduates are too young for George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

"It Is a Difficult Habit to Kick"

"The contradictions have frequently been noted: he was a socialist intellectual whose finest achievements included a mordant critique of the hypocrisy and double standards displayed by the socialist intellectuals of his day; a patriot who held most of his country's institutions in contempt; a passionate defender of historical truth who chose to write under an assumed name and who occasionally told lies; a self-styled champion of decency who backed causes that, had they prevailed, would have produced outcomes in which decency would have been difficult to discern; an atheist who decreed that his funeral should be conducted by the Church of England and that he should be buried in a rural parish churchyard. It is often the contradictions in an individual's character that give it distinction; in the case of Orwell, these were more marked and more numerous than in most, but it is not clear whether he was even aware of them. Yet it is these which explain why he is claimed by those on opposing sides—by socialists and libertarians, by conservatives as well as radicals, by patriots and internationally minded progressives. In a sense, he is up for grabs. All sorts of people can identify with him and claim him—or almost claim him—for their own and are keen, even desperate, to do so. The 'almost' is important: many of his admirers feel that if only he had fully grasped the implications of the part of his work of which they happen to approve there would be no doubt about the matter. Admirers, including this one, are eager to read the latest interpretation of his thought in the forlorn hope that this will confirm that he really would have been on their side."

Gerald Frost at The New Criterion discusses George Orwell in Spain.

"One of Those Writers Whose Influence Is So Great It Extends to People Who Have Never Read His Books"

"Rodden gives a good account of the rise and robustness of Orwell's reputation, while suggesting that the author's early death might have been timely for it. That is correct, I think. Had Orwell lived even a few more years he would have been drawn into public discussions of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four and their meaning. And had he equalled his friend Cyril Connolly's longevity and lived into the 1970s, he would have become embroiled in controversies like the Cold War, nuclear disarmament, feminism, decolonisation, Vietnam, immigration and, who knows, Northern Ireland. He would also have seen his Labour Party move, not closer to socialism, but further away from it. The way he reacted to all of this would have affected the way we think of him." 

At the Dublin Review of Books, Martin Tyrrell reviews John Rodden's Becoming George Orwell: Life and Letters, Legend and Legacy.

Burmese Daze

"Orwell may have felt he ought to be on the other side of the prison bars, but he did not seek penance by surrendering himself to the police or prison for his sins; those institutions had no moral legitimacy. Rather, he felt he would find expiation in understanding and giving voice to an oppressed community. What if all police officers heeded the pangs of conscience as Orwell did? It is time for us too to recover the cooperative values that policing seeks to suppress and find community-based forms of moving forward, of redeeming the past and keeping societies safe and just."

At Slate, Priya Satia discusses George Orwell's experience with policing.

"At Least a Few Wise and Well-Meaning Persons Found Plenty to Disagree With, and Even Dislike, in St. George"

"Orwell was moderately obsessed with class. He would probably have noted that the explosive growth of inequality in the United States over the past four decades has closely paralleled the explosive growth of the diversity industry, and would have drawn some conclusions. He might have asked: If there were two societies with the same Gini coefficient, but in one of them, the proportion of billionaires by race and gender matched that of the general population, would that society be morally better than the other? Or: If the ratio of CEO to median employee earnings was the same in two societies, but in one of them the proportion of CEOs by race and gender matched that of the general population, would that society be morally better than the other? I’m pretty sure that most diversity bureaucrats would answer 'yes' to both questions, and that Orwell would have answered 'no.'"

George Scialabba at Commonweal imagines George Orwell in the twenty-first century.

"1984 Is Watching You"

"We are living with a new kind of regime that didn't exist in Orwell's time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions."

George Packer at The Atlantic reviews Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984.

"We Live in Philip K. Dick's Future, Not George Orwell's or Aldous Huxley's"

"Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties' and sixties' California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.
"Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together."

Henry Farrell at Boston Review argues that we are moving to "a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things." 

"A Fairy Story"

"Orwell was disturbed by the way both Animal Farm and 1984 were used by conservatives as indictments of British socialism, and he often protested this interpretation of his writings. Yet he did not foresee how his ideas would be expropriated by those with views diametrically opposed to his. There is no doubt he was ingeniously exploited in the service of the most damaging criticism of the left. What made his comments so effective was that they came from a man whose own leftist credentials were beyond dispute. Orwell never found a way of counteracting the conservative exploitation of his ideas and criticism. Though it was never his major purpose to censure socialism for its failures in the modern world, this crude verdict is levelled at his work by many American critics."

John Rodden and John Rossi in Modern Age mark the seventieth anniversary of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

"The Heartbreak Is What Lingers Longest"

"The title comes from Albert Camus. Men learned in Spain, the French novelist wrote sadly, that 'one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.'"

Bob Drogin in the Los Angeles Times reviews Adam Hochschild's Spain Is in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

"For George Orwell, There Was Nothing Pro-American About Animal Farm"

"'Halas and Batchelor had to compete in the world market with Disney, so a few cartoon gags were introduced into the film to lighten its heaviness, and I believe that whatever the CIA's influence might have been, the choice for an upbeat ending came out of the animator's wish to succeed with the audience. There were movies of the period like the live film, My Son John (1952), which attacked the menace of communism head-on in a contrived and obvious fashion, so I guess anything is possible. If Orwell had lived longer, I suspect he would have vetoed any effort to translate his work into such a film.'"


Karl Cohen in a 2003 Guardian article recounts the production of the 1954 animated version of Animal Farm.

"A Wild—and One Can Only Assume Willful—Misinterpretation"

"And when it comes to political writing, Orwell's position remains unassailable. 'In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,' he writes, a sentence any writer has cause to envy. 'Politics and the English Language' is directed not at, say, suppressing the vernacular English of disenfranchised black Americans, as Self preposterously alleges, but at dispersing the fog of 'euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness' generated by the powerful and their mouthpieces to obscure the truth."


In Salon, Laura Miller responds to Will Self's criticism of George Orwell.

"A Particular Kind of Socialism"

Whatever its political vagaries, people bought the NS just as much for the 'back half,' outstanding books and arts pages that gave one of the best reflections of serious English culture for most of the last century. Evelyn Waugh was not the only one amused by what he called the notorious contrast 'between the Jekyll of culture, wit and ingenious competition and the Hyde of querulous atheism and economics which prefaces it.'"

In The New Republic, Geoffrey Wheatcroft marks the centennial of the New Statesman.

"Put the Tea Bags in First"?

"Now, imagine that tea, like coffee, came without a bag (as it used to do—and still does if you buy a proper tin of it). Would you consider, in either case, pouring the hot water, letting it sit for a bit, and then throwing the grounds or the leaves on top? I thought not. Try it once, and you will never repeat the experience, even if you have a good strainer to hand. In the case of coffee, it might just work if you are quick enough, though where would be the point? But ground beans are heavier and denser, and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boil. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter."

Christopher Hitchens in Slate recommends proper ways to make tea.

Huxley or Orwell?

Stuart McMillen at Recombiant Records offers an illustrated depiction of Neil Postman's comparison of Brave New World and 1984.

Four Legs Good

"In Zimbabwe, as the rule of Robert Mugabe's kleptocratic clique became ever more exorbitant, an opposition newspaper took the opportunity to reprint Animal Farm in serial form. It did so without comment, except that one of the accompanying illustrations showed Napoleon the dictator wearing the trademark black horn-rimmed spectacles of Zimbabwe's own leader. The offices of the newspaper were soon afterwards blown up by a weapons-grade bomb, but before too long Zimbabwean children, also, will be able to appreciate the book in its own right."

In The Guardian, Christopher Hitchens revisits George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Respectable Streets

"It was all here: class, provincial frustration, teenage rage–and, most important, an underlying empathy with the rituals of non-metropolitan life that ensured everything came out sounding fascinatingly ambivalent. And when a combination of Weller's love of Orwell and the O-level English poetry syllabus sparked new literary appetites, I was suddenly alerted to something that hadn't even occurred to me: that my favourite songwriters and musicians were viewing the suburban expanse through the same lens once used by some of the titans of 20th-century literature. In other words, contrary to what I hitherto believed, my artistic year-zero wasn't 1966, but some time in the 1930s."

John Harris in The Guardian explores the heritage of English suburban pop.

"A Parable about the Dangers of Utopianism"

"He grew up in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, witnessing revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was one of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine. He became a star in the Berlin of Sally Bowles' cabarets and a rising Adolf Hitler. He was jailed and nearly shot by Gen. Franco. He fled the Nazis through Casablanca, Morocco. He gave Albert Camus a black eye, George Orwell a holiday home, and Soviet communism an enema. He had sex with supermodel twins, took magic mushrooms with Timothy Leary*, and helped create Intelligent Design. Oh—and he was a rapist."

Johann Hari in Slate reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.

Beasts of England

"'After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm–in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.'"

Richard Brooks in The Sunday Times reveals that T. S. Elliot, as a former director of Faber and Faber, rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for publication in 1944.