George orwell

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

China bans Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84’: George Orwell would have seen the irony

Books – or lack thereof – are the latest manifestation of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The escalating dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has provoked some Beijing bookshops to remove Japanese books from their shelves. The most prominent book to be made to disappear is Haruki Murakami’s recent novel 1Q84, a critically acclaimed worldwide bestseller. Rather ironically, given the circumstances, the title echoes Orwell’s 1984 – in Japanese, ‘Q’ and ‘9’ are homonyms. Orwell has an uncanny knack of turning up at the choicest moments. Remember the glitch in July 2009 when Amazon deleted 1984 from everyone’s Kindles? People were startled by the realisation that Amazon could remove a book from

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Blogging Barbarossa

Perhaps the most horrific battle of them all began 70 years ago today. Here’s Orwell: The Germans invaded the U.S.S.R. this morning. Everyone greatly excited. It is universally assumed that this development is to our advantage. It is only so, however, if the Russians actually intend to fight back and can put up a serious resistance, if not enough to halt the Germans, at any rate enough to wear down their air force and navy. Evidently the immediate German objective is not either territory or oil, but simply to wipe out the Russian air force and thus remove a danger from their rear while they deal finally with England. Impossible

Saturday

Interconnect

Life & Letters | 12 September 2009

Sad, but for the most part the newly published edition of Orwell’s Diaries is a bore. Not altogether, of course, but much of what is interesting — some of the wartime stuff — isn’t new, but has already appeared in the Collected Essays, Letters, Diaries etc. And what is new, the Domestic Diary, a record of the kitchen garden at his Wallingford cottage, isn’t interesting — though it may come to be so in time. I suspect that contemporaries would have found little of interest in Parson Woodforde’s journal, which nevertheless delights many today, with its picture of a vanished way of life. Orwell, however, lacked the two things which

Tuesday

Martin Bright

Nick Cohen, George Orwell and Me

I can’t stay silent on the issue of Nick Cohen’s intervention at the Orwell Prize shotlisting event earlier this week. But I can’t really say too much either as Nick, in an act of over-extravagant loyalty, claimed it was a travesty that I had not made it from the longlist to the shortlist. I have already thanked Nick in person for his kind words. I have to say it was an honour to be nominated at all and congratulations to all those that made it to the shortlist (including Peters Hitchens and Oborne). But I was disappointed for my fellow former-New Statesman writers Michela Wrong and Lindsey Hilsum who really did deserve