Ianwingrove196I

Writing, music, cycling, history, politics, saving the planet

George, the hero

george-orwellGeorge is a great name. It was my dad’s name and now it is my son’s. It was also the adopted name of my literary hero George Orwell.

I love Orwell’s libertarian socialist politics, but I love the fact that he walked the walk. When you read Orwell’s work remember that he got shot through the throat in the Spanish civil war. That he evaded capture by the Stalinist-controlled police when recovering from his wounds whilst his comrades were still fighting in the front line.  That he lived ‘down and out’, and worked for a pittance in Parisian kitchens. Orwell sought experiences, so he could accurately describe the people, the situation and the emotions. I admire him like no other author because of that.

I was in that generation of cold war children who studied Orwell’s 1984 at school. England as Airfield 1 was obvious to Orwell in the 1940s and it still seemed apt in the 1980s as I went out with Cruisewatch to blockade US air force bases. The idea of a perpetual war between global forces which justifies repression and the loss of liberties was clear in the 1950’s with Stalin and Joe McCarthy, but can equally be applied to the ‘war on terror’ in our own times. Orwell was good at seeing the truth of things.

Also, 1984 and Animal Farm are such short books. Orwell compressed his big ideas into stories told simply and with real humanity. Few modern writers can replicate that brevity.

I can’t.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on August 18, 2014 by in Personal history.

Goodreads

Follow me on Twitter

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 5 other subscribers

Buy Dead Poor on Amazon

Buy Feel.it

History

%d bloggers like this: