What was Orwell for?

Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River a ‘Hizbullah kill zone’. In this episode, Adam ...  Show more

In a recent issue of the LRB, Tom Crewe asked if the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte’s fixation with male figures and the male gaze is evidence not just of a homosocial milieu, but of homosexual desire. Meanwhile, in the same issue of the paper, James Butler reviewed Fo ...  Show more

This week David discusses George Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), his great wartime essay about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different question ...  Show more

The vision of the future evoked in George Orwell’s last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was so terrifying to its first readers that some claimed to be unable to sleep at night. When the book was adapted by the BBC for the new medium of television after Orwell’s death, millions became ...  Show more

Whilst at school, a young Alan Johnson was given some money by a teacher and told to go and buy four copies of any book for the school library.

He headed down the Kings Road in Chelsea, stopping only for a sly cigarette along the way.

Having already read 'Animal F ...

George Orwell depicts what a world could possibly look like under an authoritarian regime in his dystopian novel 1984, coining neologisms such as Big Brother, Thoughtcrime and Doublethink.    

Published in 1949, it remains highly influential in popular cu ...