*

The one infallible rule of political writing is that whatever you want to say, George Orwell said it first – and said it better. When I was researching The Genius Myth, I knew that I wanted to explore the role of “monsters” in art and science, the kind of people whose CV comes with an asterisk pointing to their personal failings. And sure enough, Orwell was considering that exact phenomenon in 1944, long before the Michael Jackson trial, the #MeToo movement and the rise of the word “problematic”.

The patron saint of troublesome geniuses might well be Pablo Picasso, an undeniably gifted artist whose loved ones saw him as a “vampire”. He produced great art, but only by gorging on the attention, devotion and suffering of his family and friends. His granddaughter Marina told a story of him making paper animals for her as a child, before snatching them back: “They’re the work of Picasso.”

But how much should an artist’s personal failings cloud our view of their art? Orwell asked a similar question in his 1944 essay “Benefit of Clergy,” taking Salvador Dalí as his inspiration. Orwell really hated Dalí’s paintings, with a pungency that is now quite startling. (That said, having slogged around the Dalí museum in St Petersburg, Florida, it’s a distaste that I now share. So kitsch.) More than that, though, Orwell was unafraid to make a moral judgement on the artist—without needing to “cancel” him. He framed the question of monstrous geniuses in a way that many writers would find too brutal, too stark: how many rapes are worth it for a masterpiece?

Orwell called the impulse to excuse artists from the moral demands of everyday society the “benefit of clergy”, after a medieval practice where priests and nuns were spared the death penalty because they claimed that civil courts could not judge them. He described Dalí’s art as an insistent confession, full of symbolic objects such as high heels, images of death and putrefaction, and even flirtations with coprophilia. Because he was writing in the 1940s, Orwell felt able to offer a moral conclusion: Dalí was “a symptom of the world’s illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horse-whipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.”

To Orwell, being an artist – being a special person – was no excuse for abusive behaviour. “If Shakespeare returned to the earth tomorrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.”

In theory, most of us would agree with this sentiment. But in practice, it’s different. The film producer Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behaviour was well known enough to be the subject of jokes on a mainstream sitcom, 30 Rock, years before his trial. Money-grabbing mercenaries turned a blind eye, because his films made money. But so did sensitive left-wing types who wanted to be good people. For them, the appeal of Weinstein was that he could raise the funds for beautiful, intelligent independent films.

This debate over the personal ethics of geniuses began long before the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, but that feminist reckoning gave it extra ferocity. In a viral essay in 2017, the critic Claire Dederer asked: “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?’ The question was unavoidable, she said, because of the sheer number of abusers, racists and even murderers among the ranks of the mega-talented – and because their art often implicitly made the case for their particular perversion. “They did or said something awful, and made something great,” she wrote. “They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.” (As a parallel question, Dederer wonders if she is not monstrous enough to achieve something wonderful. “A book is made out of small selfishnesses,” she writes. “If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?”)

These conversations have left us in a cultural bind. We implicitly accept that geniuses are not like us – that’s the point of the label – but does that mean they should get the “benefit of clergy”? If you claim that you will never condone or ignore abuse, violence and discrimination, then either half the canon is closed to you . . . or you must make yourself a hypocrite.

For decades, if Hollywood were pressed about Orwell’s question about King Lear being worth the rape of a few little girls, the answer would have been a shamefaced ‘yes’.

The Genius Myth is published on June 19. Order it here.

Helen Lewis will be in conversation with Nathan Waddell, author of A Bright Cold Day, at The Orwell Festival, London, on June 23. Tickets here. Friends go free.

Emma Larkin’s introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Burmese Days is available to read on our website by kind permission of the author and Penguin Random House. We are delighted to share the essay here today.

Emma Larkin: Introduction to Burmese Days

I have always thought that Orwell’s time in Burma marks a key turning point in his life. It was during those years that he was transformed from a snobbish public-school boy to a writer of social conscience who sought out the underdogs of society. As a policeman in Burma, Orwell saw the underbelly of the empire; not the triumphant bugles or bejewelled maharajas, but the drunken sahibs pickled by heat and alcohol in mildewed clubs, the scarred and screaming Burmese in their prison cells. He witnessed first-hand the devastating effects of repressive governance and it troubled him deeply. Unable to share his views with the enthusiastic empire-builders around him, he retreated like John Flory, the main protagonist of Burmese Days, “to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile worlds”.

In Burma, Orwell acquired a reputation as someone who didn’t fit in. Unlike his contemporaries, who prided themselves in being pukka sahibs, Orwell preferred to spend most of his time alone, reading or pursuing non-pukka activities such as attending the churches of the ethnic Karen group or befriending an English opium addict who was a disgraced captain of the British Indian army. Reading Burmese Days, it is easy to see how Orwell’s hatred towards colonialism must have festered in the solitude and heat, growing like a hothouse flower. Orwell later wrote that he felt guilty for his role in the great despotic machine of empire and became haunted by the “faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my stick in moments of rage”.

Tormented by these Burmese ghosts when he returned to England, Orwell began to look more closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed masses in the working class. The working class, wrote Orwell, became the symbolic victims of the injustice he had seen in Burma. He wrote that he was compelled into the world of London’s homeless and the destitute of Paris (experiences that would, a few years later, be collated in his book Down and Out in Paris and London):

“I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.”

Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first published book and it was not until some years after he had left Burma that Burmese Days was ready for publication. Orwell’s publisher was initially reluctant to publish Burmese Days as he was concerned that Katha had been described too realistically and that some of his characters might be based on real people, making the novel potentially libellous. As a result, Burmese Days was first published further afield in the United States in 1934. A carefully censored British edition came out a year later, but only after Orwell altered the characters’ names and tried to disguise the setting. The Indian doctor, Veraswami, for instance, had his name changed to Murkhaswami (thus losing his derogatory nickname, “Dr Very-slimy”) and the Lackersteens became the Latimers. The town is called Kyauktada in the book and all references to its location in Upper Burma were removed. (The modern-day edition has been restored, with a few later editorial changes, to its original form.)

To facilitate some of the geographical disguises, Orwell drew a sketch-map of Katha for his publisher. On the map are roughly-drawn boxes marking the location of Flory’s house, the church, the bazaar, the jail and the British club – the physical and spiritual centrepiece of Burmese Days. According to Orwell, the real seat of British power lay, not in the commissioner’s mansion or the police station, but in this sad, dusty little building.

The club building still stands today, though it has since been turned into a government-owned cooperative. Where the garden used to be a riot of English flowers – larkspur, hollyhock and petunia – there are now large warehouses holding stores of rice, oil and sugar. The low tin roof of the club still hangs over a wooden verandah at the entrance, but the main room has been divided by a wall and is filled with desks and mismatched chairs. In Flory’s time, the interior boasted a mangy billiard table, a library of mildewed novels, months old copies of Punch magazine and the dusty skull of a sambar deer on one wall. Members of Katha’s British community whiled away interminable evenings with tepid gin & tonics and inane club chatter about dogs, gramophones, tennis racquets, the infernal heat and, inevitably, the insolence of the Burmese (older club members recalled the good old days of the colony when you could send a servant to the jail with a note reading, “Please give the bearer fifteen lashes”).

Most colonial memoirs I have read paint a jolly picture of life in Burma; making affectionate references to the butlers from Madras who prepared ice-cold shandy on river flotillas, ribald drinking songs around the club piano, shooting expeditions, dances. Burmese Days, however, is something very different. It is a portrait of the dark side of the Raj, chronicling sordid and shameful episodes of empire life.

Few of the characters in Burmese Days have any redeemable features; both British and Burmese alike are tarnished by the colonial system in which they live. As far as fictional heroes go, John Flory is painfully inadequate. He is cowardly, self-pitying, and carelessly cruel. In nearly every chapter he does something to debase himself, something for the reader to cringe at. But he is, like most of Orwell’s leading men, uncomfortably and almost unbearably human.

In defence of his harsh portrayal of colonial society, Orwell wrote simply:

“I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen.”

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Penguin Modern Classics

Emma Larkin is an American writer who was born, raised and still lives in Asia. She is the author of Finding George Orwell in Burma, Everything is Broken: Life inside Burma and, most recently, the novel Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok. 

There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell – who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name – has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has become a compass to help us navigate our way in times of democratic recession and backsliding, as is the case worldwide. Among all his books, the one that has left the deepest impact on generations of readers across borders is, no doubt, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I was an undergrad in Turkey when I first discovered the cautionary novel – a tattered copy coincidentally picked up in a second-hand bookshop. Winston Smith, a rebel who does not resemble the heroes in lore and legend; a lonely, pensive and observant individual in an oppressive regime. Big Brother, always watching, dominating every inch of daily life, like an unblinking celestial gaze. The rewriting of a nation’s past to suit the orders and needs of the government/the State/the Party. Sands of personal memory trying to survive the crashing waves of collective amnesia.

It all shook me to my core. I found myself thinking about the story long after I had finished the last page. Back in those days, I had quietly started writing fiction, keeping it to myself, dreaming of becoming a novelist – a wisp of a wish I could not even dare to say out loud. This also happened to be a time when I was reading extensively about the systemic human rights violations that had happened and were still happening in my motherland. Forgotten truths. Unearthed stories. Taboo subjects. Historical chronicles deftly erased by official propaganda. The labelling of anyone who dared to question the dominant narrative as a ‘traitor’. Sufferings and silences hidden under the veneer of ‘normal life’. The world described by Orwell did not seem to be far off. Nor that surreal. It felt eerily familiar and dangerously close.

In retrospect, I do not think I was alone in this feeling. Across the world there must have been so many of us who experienced a similarly uncanny sense of déjà vu upon reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time. That is because for those of us who come from ‘wounded democracies’ or autocracies-in-the-making or downright dictatorships, Oceania was never some far-fetched dystopian land set in an unforeseeable future, but something closer, much more visceral. And frightening too. It was not even a prescient warning about where things might lead if politics went unexpectedly wrong. For us, Nineteen Eighty-Four was already here. It was already happening.

[…]

 ----

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in a gloomy mood while he was dealing with sickness, deeply worried both for himself and for the state of the world. In particular, he was concerned that objective truth was withering away. The novel is, among many other things, about loss. The loss of truth. The loss of memory. The loss of love and empathy. This is not coincidental. Uncontrolled exercise of power and cruelty is only possible when truth, memory and love/empathy are fully subjugated. It is only then that a human being can be diminished to a ‘nobody’, an un person, and the whole society can be reduced down to mere numbers.

[…]

-----

Ours is the age of mass surveillance, populist authoritarian movements and fragile democracies. Social media platforms have accelerated the erosion of truth and the dissemination of misinformation, slander and hate speech. It was a mistake to regard and romanticise information as a panacea for the world’s problems. For they are completely different things: information, knowledge and wisdom. Every day we are bombarded with thousands of snippets of information, but there is very little knowledge, and no time to slow down to gain knowledge, much less wisdom. Nineteen Eighty-Four is more relevant than ever before. This remarkable novel stands out not only because of the cautionary tale it tells, but also because it sharply discerns the power of language. Words can heal, words can hurt. They can build or destroy. Since human beings think, remember and process their emotions through words, in order to control both critical thinking and emotional intelligence, language must be policed from above. The official dialect of Oceania is Newspeak. Words that have been eliminated must be instantly forgotten.

A totalitarian super-state hates ambiguities, and therefore it will not allow nuances of thought. The philosopher and Holocaust survivor Theodor Adorno once said, ‘Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.’ In this closed mindset there is no appreciation for diversity or pluralism. No room for uncertainty. Everything must be narrowed down to a rigid binary opposition – us versus them. The definition of ‘them’ might change depending on the whims of the regime but there always has to be an ‘enemy’, and history must be edited and rewritten to fit the new propaganda. The Party knows that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

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This is an extract from ’s introduction to the Folio Society’s limited edition 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, stunningly illustrated by award-winning design studio La Boca and available to purchase here.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, writing is the ultimate act of subversion. The Orwell Foundation exists to nurture and support the writers and reporters who share Orwell’s values, now and in the next generation. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Orwell’s masterpiece, we’re encouraging supporters to help us introduce more young people to the power of creative and critical writing by making a donation of £2 + £2 (that is, £5), £19.84, £198.40 - or any amount of your choosing. Thank you.

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“You had to live—did from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”

Those words were first published 75 years ago this weekend in George Orwell’s classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the greatest and certainly the most quoted political novels of the last century. Phrases, concepts and images from a book published before the coronation of Elizabeth II have entered and stayed in the public imagination and its speech. “Big Brother is Watching You”, The Thought Police and “doublethink”, the adulteration of history and the dangers of mass surveillance are referenced by politicians, journalists and members of the public. This is true even for those who have not read the book but have picked up its signals in the cultural ether.

Brand recognition explains why a popular reality television show where contestants compete to stay under surveillance is called Big Brother. But those darker elements of the novel, from government monitoring and attempts to manipulate reality, the control of language and to the use of mass hatred as a political tool, speak to far more worrying potentials and realities. Nineteen Eighty-Four even spawned an adjective to describe such circumstances, “Orwellian”, a label so powerful that opposing political wings deploy it to label developments they most fear and abhor.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is news that has stayed news. It rose up the bestseller lists in 2013, for example, in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelation of massive and secret surveillance by American agencies on citizens and governments around the world. To ward off intense global criticism, Barack Obama admitted that “you can complain about Big Brother” but that his government had got the balance right. This statement was viewed sceptically by many, but the fact that the American President invoked a novel published more than a decade before he was born spoke to its enduring power. Back in 2004 a leading surveillance scholar declared that “looking at the discourse of surveillance and technology over the past fifty years, it is difficult to overestimate” the impact the novel had had “on the public and academic imaginations.”

And not merely in terms of surveillance. In 2017, Nineteen Eighty-Four again climbed to the top of bestseller lists in the United States after Donald Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway described the lies of Trump spokesman Sean Spicer as “alternative facts”. The echoes of that disturbing phrase, which might have been drawn from the novel itself, still have the capacity to trouble. Nor is the novel’s influence restricted to the West. A recent BBC article highlighted the George Orwell Library in Putin’s Russia, a plucky if probably doomed attempt to keep the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four alive in a country whose manipulation of reality within and beyond its borders has worrying implications in the lead up the American elections. A recent conference paper I attended in Slovenia featured a photograph from the ongoing conflict in Gaza of ‘1984’ sprayed on a bare wall, a sign of what the protester presumably felt was an Orwellian reality.

Historically, meanwhile, illegally printed editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been part of resistance to totalitarian regimes. When such regimes fall—or are in a state of hopeful transition to a more liberal condition, as in Gorbachev’s USSR in the 1980s or Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s Myanmar in the 2010s)—publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is trumpeted as a sign of that country’s move to increasing intellectual and social freedoms. Some of these regimes, Russia and Myanmar among them, do return to authoritarianism, but that is a failure of the nation, not of the book.

It is possible to argue that the world of state monitoring evoked by Orwell in 1949 has now been superseded by surveillance capitalism, where we and our data are scrutinized 24/7 by companies rather than by the state. In the contemporary world, notions of privacy have changed to the point where they seem almost irrelevant, and people happily curate and promote their lives on social media, monitor themselves with health apps, and trace their whereabouts and those of others on Google Maps. As Shoshana Zuboff warned in her 2017 bestseller Surveillance Capitalism, contemporary surveillance is so integrated into our economic, personal and social lives, and is seemingly so convenient and benign, that we are willing accomplices in our own monitoring. The danger she sees is that contemporary monitoring not only tracks our behaviour but consciously works to modify it for the profit of tech giants like Google, Apple and Facebook.

All this is true, but it is also the case that the type of state surveillance depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four had not gone away. We and our data are scrutinized 24/7 by companies as well as by the state. Indeed, surveillance generally has been massively enhanced through advances in technology, crises such as 9/11, and the public’s willingness to trade security and privacy for convenience. Orwell’s novel still provides a strong and engaging depiction of a potential surveillance state most of us would want to avoid. It is for that reason that one of Britain’s leading civil rights groups calls itself “Big Brother Watch”, its slogan being “Reclaiming Privacy. Defending Freedom”. These aims suggest something broader than simply monitoring surveillance, and Nineteen Eighty-Four itself has a wider scope, dealing with the manipulation of facts and history, the grim and endless cynicism of superpower politics, how programmed mass hysteria and the control desire can be used for political purposes, and the treachery and power lust of the intellectuals who run the Inner Party, so that O’Brien can tell Winston Smith that the future “is a boot stamping on a human face forever”.

O’Brien has been proved wrong, of course, at least for most of us in Oceania (which included the US, the UK and Australia). This raises the question of the prediction that seems encoded in the novel’s title. Orwell toyed with the idea of calling it The Last Man in Europe, a title which would have aroused none of the increasing excitement and discussion Nineteen Eighty-Four generated in the years leading up to the iconic year of 1984.  One small tech company who took advantage of that excitement was Apple. In a year that coincided with the Olympics in Los Angeles, an Apple ad depicted a young female athlete running into a room full of mindless Party drones watching a Party official ranting on a massive screen. The plucky, individualistic athlete (meant to represent Apple) hurls a sledgehammer that destroys the screen and its messenger (meant to represent the monolithic IBM).

When the real world in 1984 proved to be very different from the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, some critics sniped that the prophecy and the reality were fundamentally at odds. Orwell, they reckoned, was wrong. In fact, of course, and except for an American edition, the correct title was rendered not as a year, but in words. Why might this difference matter? Winston writes the year “1984” in his diary (although he is uncertain of the actual year), so it is not a question of getting the year wrong. But the words Nineteen Eighty-Four suggest a state of affairs rather than a particular historical moment. When we compare our current world to Orwell’s scenario, we do not think of Maggie Thatcher and bad haircuts. Nineteen Eighty-Four has escaped ‘1984’.

Does the year itself matters? Many people claim that because Orwell was writing the novel in 1948 he simply reversed the last two numbers, perhaps to suggest some significant connection between his actual world and the imagined world he fabricated. But the manuscript of the book undermines this claim. Orwell originally typed the year Winston struggles to recall as “1980”. Over this, presumably later (given that Orwell wrote it in ink) he crossed out “1980” and replaced it with “1982”. He then (possibly later still) crossed out “1982” and, again in ink, wrote “1984”. Why the change? We do not know, but clearly the manuscript disposes of the ‘reversal of numbers’ theory. It also critically weakens the argument that Orwell chose 1984 in memory of his first wife, Eileen, who wrote a poem titled “End of the Century: 1984”, published in 1934. At first glance, this seems a startling coincidence, and some have argued that Orwell might have been inspired by aspects of the poem. But the manuscript shows that what would eventually be one of the most famous years in English Literature was only Orwell’s third choice. Had he called the finished novel Nineteen Eighty (his first choice of year) let alone 1980 or The Last Man in Europe, no one would suggest that Eileen’s poem was in the front of his mind when he wrote the novel. If there is a trace of the poem in the novel begun a decade later, it is exceedingly slight.

Clearly though, dates do matter, and the 75^th anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s publication marks something to recognise and celebrate, exemplifying great literature’s continuing capacity to provoke and instruct, and in the case of this novel especially, to inspire independent thought and action.

Peter Marks is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney, where he taught for 25 years. He previously taught at the University of Hull and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Marks is particularly interested in the work of George Orwell; in relationships between literature and cinema, and between literature and politics; in literary periodical culture; in the essay form; in utopias, and in surveillance, particularly as depicted in literature and cinema. He is currently the Orwell Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four at 75: what’s on this month

This Saturday marks the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s seminal novel - and “call to thought and action” - Nineteen Eighty-Four. We’ve prepared a brief guide to the celebrations taking place this month, and how you can get involved.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, writing is the ultimate act of subversion. The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity which exists to nurture and support the writers and reporters who share Orwell’s values, both those working now and in the next generation. All this month, we’re encouraging supporters to help us introduce more young people to the power of creative and critical writing by making a donation of £2 + £2 (that is, £5), £19.84, £198.40 - or any amount of your choosing.

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Tabby Hayward in conversation with Richard Blair. Photo by Alastair Blair

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Tabby: So I thought I'd just start at the beginning. Why did your father and mother come to Marrakech?

Richard: Well, it was due to the fact that in 1937 or so, after he'd come back from Spain, he developed TB. And he had been to a place called Preston Hall in Kent at the behest of his brother in law. And he was given some, at that time, some money anonymously, to go and have a holiday somewhere warm. And Marrakech was the place that both my father and my mother Eileen decided upon. And this is where they came to, via Casablanca, and ended up in Marrakech.

Tabby: And did they ever find out who the anonymous benefactor was?

Richard: Many, many years later. It was Michael Myers, and he (Orwell) did repay him, oh crikey, I think it was somewhere around about 1945. But at that time, it was anonymous. And I guess they were grateful for it.

Tabby: And how was your father's, and your mother's, health at the time then, if that was the main reason they came to Morocco?

Richard: Father's health was not terribly good. He'd been wounded in Spain. He'd been treated for TB. And of course, in those days they didn't have the antibiotics that we have nowadays. And he came here, and I think there was a lot of grumbling and muttering and he did complain a bit but did he enjoy it, the experience on the whole? I suppose he did. I think my mother probably did. She would send off some quite ribald letters back to her friend, Nora Myles, about the flies and the coffins and the dead bodies. And you know, every time he was sitting in a restaurant, the flies would dash out when the coffin went past, and then all come back again, in about five minutes.

They (Orwell and Eileen) did move about a little bit, they went up into the Atlas Mountains, and spent a week up there. And I think they probably enjoyed that. I hope that they enjoyed  the experience. I think my mother probably did more so than my father, but he busied himself, writing Coming Up For Air.

Tabby: On this trip is there a site, a place that we're going that you're particularly interested to see or experience?

Richard: Well, we're going to go and see various places where they stayed briefly. But the actual site where the bungalow (Villa Simont) was that they lived in for (most of) the period of time they were here, no longer exists. But we have defined it down to a very small area of probability. And so I guess that is going to be the place of homage, as it were.

Tabby: And how do you think it will feel, or do you think it will be an emotional experience, to see it?

Richard: Yes of course it will, it's a pilgrimage for me, personally speaking.

Tabby: You mentioned Orwell moved around a lot, over the course of his life. And I was interested, as the Orwell Youth Prize theme this year is about home - I wondered, do you have a sense of where home was for your father?

Richard: That's quite a difficult question. I'm not sure, because he died so young. I think, had he survived his TB in the 40s, in the late 40s, I think Jura would have been his, I would like to have thought that Jura would have been his base, from which he would then go to other places, but always come back to his island in the Hebrides.

Tabby: And still on that theme of home, he wrote Coming up for Air while he was staying in Morocco, and to read the novel, you don't get an immediate sense that he was far away from England. It's such an English novel…

Richard: He was a patriotic man, in spite of what he may have written. He'd like to have a crack at most people. Ultimately, it would come back to the fact that he was a patriot and he would fight for his country, in spite of the many things he may have said.

Tabby: Do you think that being away from England helped him to write some of these things and realise that sense?

Richard: I’m not sure! I think he grumbled quite a lot while he was here, but Eileen sort of just put up with it. I think her health wasn't – was probably okay, in those days. I think she probably may have had some underlying problems which she slightly ignored. It wasn't too serious – well at that time wasn’t too serious, but which turned out to be so later on, in the first half of the war.

Tabby: Do you have any favourite anecdotes or moments from the diaries about their time here? I know you mentioned yesterday about the Japanese red bicycle. Are there any stories that stand out to you?

Richard: So the Japanese red bicycle, which my mother bought to cycle in from the bungalow into town…Why a red Japanese bicycle, I'm not quite sure! And I guess that the funniest bit really is Eileen’s letter to Nora Myles, about when you're sitting in a restaurant, which is inhabited by flies. And every time a corpse went past, the flies vacated the restaurant, only to come back again five minutes later. I think it kind of sums it up. Because my mother was actually very funny, very dry sense of humor, like my father. And I think this is missed by so many people. People think, Oh, she's complaining. She's not, she's having a quiet dig at my father. She knew perfectly well, what my father was like, and she accepted him for what he was. Alright, she gave up her career. But I think she saw my father as someone who was probably –  I mean, they were equal, intellectually speaking. But she thought, no, I'll let him. And it was the mores of the day, that a wife tended to allow the husband to be the patriarch, the breadwinner, call it what you will. And I think she probably quite, I don't know, I think probably she was quite willing to step aside and let him carry on. Which has been misinterpreted time and time again.

Tabby: It’s interesting, the note that you mentioned about in her letter saying about the flies, coming to the table, and then going away, and then coming back later, that comes into Orwell’s essay ‘Marrakech’, doesn’t it? So you can see them inspiring each other?

Richard: Yes, that's right. On balance, I'm not sure that he (enjoyed his time in Marrakech). He found the heat oppressive. I think he disliked the way that the local people treated their animals. You know, the poor old donkeys were just worked to death until they dropped dead literally  where they stood. And he didn't understand the way the local people worked and their philosophy, any more than they would have understood his philosophy about animals because he was very much into nature. He liked his animals very much, of course, as we know, from previous books, and life in Wallington with his goats and so on, so forth. And they had goats, when they were here. And they tried to create a garden, and cultivated bits and pieces.

Tabby: So they were making a home?

Richard: They were trying to make a home! Which they were never going to keep. But it was something to do. And if you read the letters, it's surprising how often he was ill. His chest would then - it wasn't just a question of a few days of not doing anything. It was a whole fortnight of not doing anything. A lot of time was spent not doing very much.

I think they enjoyed the trip up into the Atlas Mountains. Very much.

Tabby: I just wondered if you had any words of encouragement or advice for young writers who might be entering the prize this year, or any bits of Orwell’s writing they should have a look at?

Richard: I suppose my advice would be, as it always has been, is Orwell had a great deal to say about an awful lot of things with a great deal of common sense. That is, common sense, clarity of thought. And I think don't be frightened to say what you want to say. As we know from his essay about why I write, the six rules of English, but the sixth one was break any of these rules, but don't say anything absolutely outrageous.

Tabby: Yes. That's good advice in general, I think, for all writers!

Richard: I think so! It should be pinned to the wall of every public building in the country.

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I'm one of those people who feels that they were formed by Orwell politically, and I took on the job with unalloyed joy. I now realize this was a bit naive. The texture of Nineteen Eighty-Four is entirely bleak: its food revolting, its smells nauseating, its people physically grotesque and morally warped by hate and cowardice. The hero has an ulcer on his leg, a nasty cough, varicose veins and five false teeth, and resents and despises everyone around him. The plot narrows to a point of absolute horror, and refuses the reader any glimmer of hope. While I was writing my book, I also researched the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, and by the time I was finished, not only I, but everyone close to me, was exhausted by it. I would be talking to my husband and see the look of resignation on his face, and realize that, yet again, I was on the subject of Stalin's Terror, the rise of Hitler, or the Cultural Revolution. But, while my friends and family may have gotten very sick of me by the end of this process, and I certainly got sick of authoritarianism, I never really tired of Orwell. There's something inexhaustible about his clear-sightedness. Every time I read certain passages, they seemed more startling and more true.

Some elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, became more frustrating with each reading. The most important of these is the figure of Julia.

In some ways, the Julia of Nineteen Eighty-Four should be a feminist icon. She is honest and fearlessly dismissive of Party dogma. Her ability to outwit the regime—having multiple affairs, trading on the black market, laughing at the Party instead of being paralyzed by fear—make her far more traditionally heroic than Winston Smith. In her frank sensuality and matter-of-fact way of bossing Winston around, she feels as if she is based on a real woman Orwell knew, and one who was worth knowing.

But this is only half the picture. In the other half, Julia feels like a projection of male fantasy, and a version of male fantasy that's exceptionally unpleasant. Of living with thirty other women in a hostel, all Julia has to say is: "Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" She breezily approves of Winston's notion of murdering his wife, and even chides him for not having really done it. At their first tryst, she asks Winston what he previously thought of her, and laughs in delight when he replies, "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago, I thought of smashing your head in with a cobblestone."

Misogyny runs through the book, both as a theme and as a nasty background smell. We're told Winston "disliked nearly all women," and that "it was always the women, and especially the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." Any hint of feminism is seen as totalitarian: women having short hair, not wearing make-up, working with machines, are all framed as an unnatural oppression imposed by the Party. Freedom for Winston is speaking the truth; freedom for Julia is putting on scent and showing herself to her boyfriend in a pretty frock. As their affair progresses, Julia loses her independence and moulds herself to Winston's desires until she is agreeing to die and kill for his political beliefs, even though they are meaningless to her: whenever he talks about politics, she falls asleep. Meanwhile, we're told Winston loves Julia, even as he constantly expresses contempt for her mental capacities and character, and doesn't even feel any concern for her safety. He drags her along to his meeting with O'Brien although there's no reason to take that risk; in his cell at Love, he suffers not at all from the knowledge that his great love is being tortured. In the climactic betrayal of the book, he saves himself from the rats by crying, "Do it to Julia, not to me!" but neither Winston nor Orwell spares a thought for what happens to Julia next.

As their affair progresses, Julia […] moulds herself to Winston's desires until she is agreeing to die and kill for his political beliefs, even though they are meaningless to her: whenever he talks about politics, she falls asleep.

This is all the more troubling to a reader who admires Orwell as much as I do. Here is a man who spent his life in the fight against oppression, against the silencing of individual conscience, against the subjection of the weak to the violence of the strong, and who did so with unique brilliance and clarity. But in Nineteen Eighty-Four's treatment of women, he betrays these principles. Apparently, depressingly, some animals are more equal than others even to Orwell. In the stark implausibility of Julia's character, there's even a whiff of 2 + 2 = 5.

As soon as I started work on my book, though, I found that Nineteen Eighty-Four offered me a way out of this. In Julia's scenes, there's that lingering sense of a real and very interesting woman Orwell might have known, or wanted to know, a woman he thought about deeply enough to bring her to vibrant life in fiction. And the character of Julia is only contradictory and implausible if we take her at face value, as she presents herself to Winston. True, that's how Orwell presents her to us, but it's not the only way she can be seen. If we assume she loves Winston utterly selflessly, that Winston's obsession with murdering women delights her, that her only sentiments toward other women are disgust and hate, she is jarringly implausible: a projection of unpleasant male desires. The same things are all too credible, though, if they're a role she plays to please a man.

There is a kind of woman who performs all the time to manage men's reactions: to attract him, to appease him, to avoid an argument or elicit praise. The more sexist a society is, the more women engage in this behaviour, and the more normalized it is. Until recently, this kind of play-acting was taught to girls as the only way to win a man and keep him happy in marriage. It was interesting to consider this in the context of Airstrip One, where everyone is required to lie and dissemble all the time. Out of view of the telescreens, Winston is able to be himself with Julia; this perhaps is what love means for him. But Julia is a woman, and one who has never known a world without Big Brother. Being honest with another person—being known—has no place in her experiences or her desires.

Once I started to see Julia through this lens, she became entirely real and consistent to me. From here, my novel was easy to write. Indeed, it was as if Orwell had deliberately left me tools and building materials, scattered through his book. There were brilliant inventions like the Junior Anti-Sex League and Pornosec, which Orwell mentions but never lets us see. I was able to follow Julia to the women's hostel where she lives, to imagine her visiting an artsem clinic. Orwell gives Julia a history of past lovers, but never tells us anything about them; he has her trading on the black-market, but never says what that is like. All that material was now mine. I could devise a childhood for her that showed something of the history of Airstrip One; the revolution that brought the Party to power and the fate of the idealists who fought in it. I could take her into the homes of proles (taking advantage of her barely developed role as a black-market trader again), and put her on terms of intimacy with them, and let her hear their stories and their opinions.

Orwell gives Julia a history of past lovers, but never tells us anything about them; he has her trading on the black-market, but never says what that is like. All that material was now mine.

I could also go into her inner life and answer questions generations of readers have wondered about. Why was she attracted to Winston in the first place, when he's described as puny, fearful, tubercular, middle-aged, losing his teeth? Why does she express it with a note that declares I LOVE YOU, when, in their first meetings, she seems less enamoured than matter-of-fact, and the subject of love does not come up? Why does she bring Winston black-market goods for weeks, running all the danger for them both, when he never even offers to help her pay? Why does she go with Winston to see O'Brien, when it amounts to confessing sexcrime to an Inner Party member, and there's no need for her to go? Why does O'Brien, when pretending to recruit them both into the Brotherhood, address himself only to Winston? Why does she sit in docile silence through OBrien's catechism about which atrocities they're willing to commit, allowing Winston to answer for her?

While I was at it, I could answer all the questions I'd always had about other characters. Does the Party stalwart Parsons really shout "Down with Big Brother!" in his sleep, or is it a slander brought against him by his brutal children? What is it like for him to live with those children, and to love them, as he seems to love them? How did Ampleforth feel about disfiguring great poetry with Newspeak and Party dogma? As a person sensitive enough to do this work, did it not chafe at him? How would O'Brien appear to someone who wasn't infatuated with him, as Winston is—to Julia, for instance, or to his co-workers at the Ministry of Love? It often felt as if Orwell had intended someone to write the novel I was writing, and had deliberately, generously, left some of the best bits for them to fill in.

To make a long story short, despite all the bleakness of the material (and the degree to which I depressed my friends and family with stories about the Holodomor), working on this book was an inexhaustible pleasure.

And while the experience only deepened my view that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work with misogyny built into it, I'm also more firmly convinced of the genius of its writer. I was once inclined to the common view that, while Orwell was a great writer of nonfiction, he wasn't a natural fiction writer, and Nineteen Eighty-Four was really an essay masquerading as a novel. But again and again, I was amazed by the deftness of Orwell's plot or the incisiveness of his characterization. In a satire, however serious, most characters tend to be a little two-dimensional, written as they are to demonstrate a point. But Orwell manages to show us the ugliest features of types like Ampleforth and Parsons while also making us feel their pain and terror and humiliation and loneliness.

In conclusion, I would love to be able to say it's not true that Orwell was a misogynist; that I've seen through it all, and there's nothing in it. But that is wishful thinking. Sexism, both his and his time's, permeates Nineteen Eighty-Four. Failing that, I'd like to be able to say it doesn't really matter. But I can't say that, and neither, I think, would Orwell. If he believed in anything, it was in the power of art as propaganda; to him, it always mattered what art said. And I've met too many woman this year who remember their reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four as an insult or an ordeal, as a time when a great man told them they belonged in a servant role, that their dreams were unnatural delusions, and their pain and ideas had no importance. Great writing makes us believe in it completely; when it treats some people as less than fully human, it can do real harm. So Nineteen Eighty-Four is both gravely flawed and desperately important. In offering another view of Julia, and how women fit into Orwell's vision, I'm hoping my novel can do something to bridge that gap.

Sandra Newman

Julia is published by Granta in the UK and Harper Collins in the US

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2 November 2023

Rained in violent bursts throughout the night before my departure. Weather in London very bleak - steady downpour, flooding on the roads, and Storm Ciaran threatening to delay flights. Strikes at French Air Traffic Control also meant our flight was rerouted – but none of this competes with Orwell and Eileen’s complex journey to Marrakech, 85 years ago, in September 1938.

They travelled by sea, originally arriving in Gibraltar (by mistake – they could have got off at Tangier, where the ship docked first) then back to Tangier, where they planned to get a ship to Casablanca, but the boats were full, so they had to travel by train, through Spanish Morocco – which Orwell had been hoping to avoid, as his passport showed that he had fought on the Republican side in Spain. However, they passed through without incident (other than their newspapers being confiscated) crossing two borders before reaching Pierrejean (now Sidi Kacem) in French Morocco, where they lost their baggage.  They then took a connecting train to Casablanca, staying for two nights, waiting to be reunited with their suitcases, before taking the train to Marrakech.

My journey was dazzlingly short by contrast – just 3 and a half hours in the air – from the storms and heavy cloud of England, over the dry and dusty terrain of Morocco – and then the plane turned and the rugged High Atlas Mountains came into view, as we came in to land.

Collected at the airport by our driver Ismail, we arrived at the President Kennedy Resort in the early afternoon. Swimming pool surprisingly cold, even under the hot sun. Palm trees, cats, Casablanca beers and noisy birdsong, as the group met, some for the first time, and our adventures began.

No eggs.

View from my hotel room

3 November 2023

Breakfasted on crusty bread, eggs (one, hardboiled), soft cheese, honey, fresh yogurt, oranges. Headed out to the Oued Tensift. Stood on the banks of the very dry river - it flooded when Orwell was here - and heard Richard Blair, Orwell’s son, read from his father’s diary, of the ‘fresh water mussels, very similar to those in the Thames, moving to & fro in the mud leaving deep track behind them’. No chance of spotting these on our visit, the dry river instead occupied by a stray dog.

Then to the Museum for Water Civilisation – impressively extensive history of water in Marrakech, its political, social and environmental importance, risks and customs – especially how water is shared in communities, by the Jemaa, a traditional assembly in each community, who regulate the management of natural resources to avoid conflicts related to water use or rights.

We made the short journey to the approximate location of Villa Simont, as established by our guide, Kevin Carter. Orwell wrote Coming Up For Air, in all its Englishness, in the Villa Simont’s observatory, amidst the heat and dust of Morocco. The building has since been destroyed, with not much to see there now other than a few stray dogs, broken bottles and rubbish. Richard read from his mother and father’s letters about the new home they were making in Marrakech, with goats and chickens, and no oven. We took a picture, imagining from Kevin’s photographs how the Villa would have looked. We then lunched at Hotel Wazo – Kevin later established that the true site of the Villa Simont would have been just beyond the hotel garden – just a short distance away from where we had stood.

Later, we headed to the Jemma El Fna (central square) for dinner at Cafe France - excellent tagine, overlooking the bustling square. Saddened by a monkey on a chain, dressed up in silk trousers and jacket, and by the poor horses, walking themselves further down the taxi ranks, dust and flies clouding their faces. Drumming, singing, shouting. Market stalls piled high with oranges and bananas, sparkling shoes, gleaming lanterns, the growing darkness thick with smells of spices, incense, urine, horses. We asked Ismail when the market closed and he told us it went on all night.

Home ready for a busy day tomorrow. One egg.

Richard Blair reading from his father’s diaries at the Oued Tensift.

4 November 2023

Headed back to Jemma El Fna this morning on an Orwell pilgrimage - as well as taking in the snake charmers, the painted ceramics, the music from the Shilha people from the High Atlas Mountains, the mountains of vivid red, orange, green and yellow spices, looking more like paint pigment than stuff to eat.

We started at the former hotel where Orwell and Eileen first stayed (Eileen noticed it was a brothel – Orwell didn’t), and the former home of Madame Vellat, which they then moved to after realising this fact (before moving on again to Villa Simont).

We walked through the medina (old town) to the Mellah, the Jewish quarter. More cats in this area, waiting by the butcher’s stall for chicken guts and gristle.

Paused for mint tea and lunched on the top floor of a very nice establishment – little dishes of jewel-bright salads, chicken pastilla (sweet and spicy inside the flaky pastry).

We then stopped at the site of the former British Consulate where Eric and Eileen registered upon arrival (with Orwell’s date of birth incorrectly marked as 1902 rather than 1903 – apparently a mistake also on his passport); the hospital where Orwell was seen by Dr Diot, a friend of a friend of Eileen’s brother Lawrence; and the Hotel de Ville where the couple also registered - with the interesting spelling of Eileen’s home town of South Shields, noted as South Swecas…

To dinner at Al Fassia, a community restaurant run by women who have escaped from abusive relationships or difficult family situations. The food - sublime. Harira, a traditional soup to start, followed by lamb and aubergine tagine and couscous - and then, when you thought that was that, a second round of chicken and pumpkin tagine. A mix up with the ordering, but a wonderful treat to sample these rich yet subtle flavours.

No eggs.

Staircase in what used to be Madame Vellat’s house.

5 November 2023

Early start to Casablanca - a three or so hour drive. Called Casablanca (obvious, retrospectively) because the buildings are all white - in Marrakech they are all pink/red, or terracotta coloured. Fes is yellow, Chefchaouen blue. Rain started up about half way there, grew steadily heavier and foggier as we entered Casablanca.

Stopped for lunch at Rick’s Cafe - the real one was a movie set in London but this has been exquisitely recreated, with a live jazz band in the evening (we had recorded music over lunch) and a delicious menu.

Next, we drove past the railway station (rain still heavy) where Eric and Eileen arrived (separately from their luggage), then on to the Rialto cinema, where they watched a film on their brief stay, and finally the city hall, police station and French consulate. The statue of the first Resident-General, Marshal Lyautey, was moved to the grounds of the French Consulate in April 1959 (Morocco gained independence in 1956) from its former position in the middle of the main square in front of the city’s courthouse.

On the drive back, rain continued most of the way, but stopped about an hour from Marrakech. Sun sets very swiftly here and the bus journey gave the perfect opportunity to appreciate this - sun like a very shiny red grapefruit, spectacular in the sky for about 5 minutes, then rapidly sinking, leaving a lovely orangey glow, which lasts another 20 or so minutes before full darkness. Orwell described in his diaries a green sky at sunset. I tried to see it as he had – but it stayed orange for me.

No eggs.

The Rialto cinema, Casablanca

6 November 2023

Headed out to the Jnane El Harti gardens, visited by Orwell and Eileen, and mentioned in Orwell’s ‘Marrakech’ essay as the site of the gazelle with the hindquarters that looked good enough to eat with mint sauce. The gardens used to contain a zoo, but no more. The gardens are also where Orwell saw the turtles ‘coming up for air’ - which he expands into sea turtles in the novel.

Next, to the hospital which Eileen visited for neuralgia. We then stopped at the Cafe Les Negociants, frequented by Eileen and Eric (and where they later stayed in rooms, probably on the first floor) for coffee and more interesting materials to peruse, including the couple’s shopping lists, photographs and letters. 

Next, to Chatr bookshop, also frequented by Orwell and Eileen and on to lunch at Chez Lamine - which may not have been visited by Orwell but was by Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver and Mary Berry. Not yet tired of tagine.

We visited the European cemetery, the site where  Simon Fankhauser (owner of the Villa Simont) and Madame Vellat are buried - Madame Vellat rather sadly in an unmarked grave, just a little mound of rubble with a brick on top. But there was life in the cemetery –  Ismail handed me a ‘gift’: a small, flailing tortoise with a long stalk of grass in his mouth, like he was smoking a pipe. The tortoise seemed fairly unfazed being suddenly airborne (his head stayed out) but peed in a surprising quantity for such a small creature. When we had circled the cemetery, we spotted him still making his slow, persistent way along the path, the grass pipe still in his mouth.

Watched the sundown from my hotel balcony before dinner. Tomorrow - The High Atlas Mountains.

One egg.

The Jnane El Harti gardens

7 November 2023

Today to the High Atlas Mountains. Ismail had had to replace the old, grumbling minibus (which had struggled coming back from Casablanca) but this one made it up the very long and winding road nicely. Those who had visited last year remembered the roads as being far worse – they seemed newly resurfaced and we made it up in half the time expected.

We stopped at Taddert. Many places are called Taddert, or similar, as it means village, but this one had been correctly pinpointed by the group as the location of the Auberges des Noyeurs, the hotel where Orwell and Eileen stayed in Jan 1939 after Orwell had completed his first draft of Coming Up for Air. It boasted views ‘panoramique’, which were spectacular from the terrace, where we encountered some interested cats (perhaps on their own Orwell pilgrimage), and enjoyed strong mint tea, walnuts from the walnut tree, and tomato omelettes.

Our host (who promised that next year, the hotel would be ready for us to stay in) gave us the tour of the hotel - now decaying and worn but with remnants of its former grandeur, especially in the bar downstairs where Orwell and Eileen likely spent their January evenings by the open fire. In his diaries, Orwell describes the hotel as being ‘exactly like a cheap Paris hotel’. Seems unlikely that it will be back to that standard again anytime soon (apparently the owner made the same promise last year, before offering to sell the place for 1000 euros). 

Not quite tempted by this interesting offer, we went on, to the highest point of the mountains - it’s not clear the Blairs ever made it here, but the views were wonderful. Bitingly cold winds. Dramatic drive back down again, for our final night in Marrakech.

I’m not usually sentimental about visiting places where writers have lived. I couldn’t see Orwell’s green sunsets, cannot pretend to be as interested in egg counting as he (there are 139 eggs mentioned in Orwell’s Marrakech diaries), and I can’t correctly identify, as he did, types of trees or birds, beyond the obvious. But up in the mountains on the hotel terrace, I could imagine, at least, the feeling of having completed a draft of a novel, and coming up here to the panoramic views of this extraordinary landscape, ‘up for air’.

Two eggs, in omelette form.

At the Auberge des Noyers in Taddert, the High Atlas Mountains

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Last month a blue plaque was unveiled in Sunderland, where Eileen O’Shaughnessy went to school. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, born in South Shields on September 25, 1905, met Eric Blair - better known by his pen name George Orwell - in 1935, while she was studying educational psychology at University College London and Blair was a struggling writer. The couple married a year later in Wallington, Hertfordshire.

As well as being a writer in her own right, Eileen is increasingly recognised as having had a strong influence on her husband’s writing, particularly in Animal Farm. She died under operation in 1945, shortly before the book’s publication. In 2020, she was the subject of a new biography by Sylvia Topp, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell.

After the unveiling, Richard Blair spoke to Gilly Hope on BBC Radio Newcastle about his memories of his mother. You can read an edited transcript below, or listen to the interview on BBC sounds (begins 1hr 33).

The new plaque was organised by Professor Angela Smith, who leads Sunderland University's SunGen Interdisciplinary Research Network. Richard Blair, the adopted son of George and Eileen, unveiled the plaque at Langham Tower, which formed part of Eileen’s former school, Sunderland Church High School.

Professor Smith said: "The blue plaque marking Eileen O'Shaughnessy's connection with Sunderland will allow us to think more about the people who have done remarkable things and yet have not thus far been celebrated.”

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GH – My guest at the moment is Richard Blair. His mum was called Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and she married George Orwell in the 1930s. Now there’s a blue plaque that’s been unveiled in Sunderland where Eileen went to school. We had a chat about this tribute to his mum who died – she was only 39 years old when she passed away, and Richard was just a baby.

RB – “Yes, so I was only 10 months old – she died in March of 1945. I think it was of cancer of the womb, but she had been ill all during the war. My father and she lived in fairly uncomfortable conditions in London - but she did have problems, and when he went to Germany she decided that she would come up to this part of the world, back to Greystone, which was the family home for another member of our family, so that she would go into hospital and have an operation - a hysterectomy. Sadly, when she was put under the anaesthetic she immediately had a heart attack and died.”

GH – So the memories that you have from your mum are almost stories that have been passed down, from her family and from your dad. What do you know about her younger years here? Because she was born in Shields, wasn’t she?

RB – “Born in South Shields. In fact, the odd thing about the Blair family is that you never talked about the past. So what I know is what I’ve gleaned over the decades, and what I’ve had to read. My father’s younger sister Avril, who became my legal guardian, never talked about things of the past. She never talked about my adoptive mother, she never talked much about my father. So it was what I had to read, essentially. We weren’t an odd family, but we weren’t a huggy-kissy family.”

GH – That was of the time, wasn’t it? People didn’t share their feelings perhaps as we do now.

RB – “You kept it to yourself. So that’s the way I was brought up. It was going to school that I slowly started to absorb the fact of who my father was, and then later on who my mother was. And of course it’s only in the last few years that it’s really accelerated. And the fact that the importance of my mother is now coming to the surface, because she was very important; she was very important to my father. Without her he would not have written some of the stuff, especially Animal Farm. When he was writing Animal Farm they would sit up in bed and he would read her a chapter or a piece, and she would listen, and she would give her advice from a woman’s point of view how the animals might react. I think that’s why when you read Animal Farm it’s quite different to when you read any of the other books – it’s her influence. Some people say ‘oh well of course he was just improving his style’, but Animal Farm is quite different and it’s a fabulous little tale.”

GH – Do you think it’s because your mum – she majored in psychology, didn’t she? So there was that aspect to her.

RB – “She was a deep thinker, and I think she had the measure of my father. In spite of the fact that he said, when they were living together, ‘well I must get away, I’ve got work to do’, and just left her to feed the animals, do the cooking, look after the vegetables, that sort of thing. In that sense she was devoted to him. But she also had an independent mind, and she knew her mind, and I think she used it on my father without him realising.”

GH – Well she sounds a formidable woman. It's been a great honour to meet you and to hear just a little bit of her life. Thank you very much.

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