George Orwell

also died in London

Biography | Orwell Foundation (orwellfoundation.com) GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

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. George Orwell, “Bookshop Memories” in Fortnightly (November 1936)

The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda. Review of The Men I Killed by Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, CB, CMG, DSO, in New Statesman and Nation (28 August 1937)

NGC 3132 (Wikipedia) NGC 3132 (also known as the Eight-Burst Nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, or Caldwell 74) is a bright and extensively studied planetary nebula in the constellation Vela. Its distance from Earth is estimated at 613 pc or 2,000 light-years.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) (findoes.etoncollege.com) Huxley taught very briefly at Eton during the war: Eric Blair (George Orwell) and Harold Acton were among his pupils during that period.

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature. Polemic, No. 2 (January 1946)

It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so. George Orwell, review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939)

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. George Orwell

George Orwell (Wikipedia) Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.