George Orwell

by Nigel Flynn

Book Overview

Traces the life of the English author and social critic and provides critical interpretations of his controversial works. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 058201039X
• ISBN13: 9780582010390
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Length: 40 Pages

Customer Reviews

An English Celebration of George Orwell

Nigel Flynn is an experienced editor and writer who studied at the University of Lancaster. His 112-paged "Life and Works" of "George Orwell" is a valuable introduction to the major texts written by George Orwell and aims to encourage a critical understanding of these in relation to events in Orwell's life and literary career, as well as the socio-political climate of his times. Photographs on nearly every page help to tell the history. George Orwell is one of the most popular writers and interesting free thinkers to have written prose in the English language. He is best known for his titles "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four", books that introduced phrases into the English language such as "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" and "Big Brother is watching you". The name "George Orwell" is a pen name that was used by Eric Blair, an Anglo-Bengali born of English expatriates. He left Bengal at an early age, was schooled in England, then joined the British Imperial Police and served in Burma from 1922 -27. Orwell (Blair) wrote about it in "The Road to Wigan Pier"(1937) - "I was in the police, which is to say that I was part of the actual machinery of despotism . . . in the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters, and there is an appreciable difference between doing dirty work and merely profiting by it". The eventual scourge of socialists and Tories alike, Orwell (Blair) returned to Europe to temporarily tramp about Paris and London, then volunteered to fight for insurgents in the Spanish Civil War, before settling down to a writing career and allowing his war wounds to heal. Nigel Flynn shows how Orwell's (Blair's) essays and books were related to his life experiences and events in which he lived. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" reveals Orwell's work in propaganda and disinformation during WWII in the employ of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). We follow Orwell's development as a man and a writer until we realize that "Nineteen Eighty-Four" has already happened! It began in 1941 with a December bang at Pearl Harbor: for the second time in less than twenty-five years, the U.S. partnered with their two-time nemesis (1776, 1812) and American-powered British Empire emerged victorious from an international brawl between competing brands of fascism. Meanwhile economic fascists usurped the rhetoric of capitalism to hide their anti-capitalist corporatism (see Nicholas John Cull's "Selling War"). Anglos and Yanks have been living an Orwellian nightmare ever since - the latest version of double-speak is the 'War on Terror', which in reality is a 'War on Freedom' camouflaged by information warfare (IW).