153 Facts About George Orwell

George Orwell's work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.

George Orwell's great-great-grandfather Charles Blair was a wealthy slave-owning country gentleman and absentee owner of two Jamaican plantations; hailing from Dorset, he married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland.

George Orwell's grandfather Thomas Richard Arthur Blair was an Anglican clergyman.

George Orwell's father was Richard Walmesley Blair, who worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China.

George Orwell's mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family could not afford it.

George Orwell came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton.

George Orwell chose to stay at St Cyprian's until December 1916, in case a place at Eton became available.

George Orwell passed the exam, coming seventh out of the 26 who passed.

George Orwell was appointed an Assistant District Superintendent on 29 November 1922, at the pay of Rs.

George Orwell recalled that "I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible".

George Orwell spent much of his time alone, reading or pursuing non-pukka activities, such as attending the churches of the Karen ethnic group.

George Orwell drew on his experiences in the Burma police for the novel Burmese Days and the essays "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant".

George Orwell visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer.

George Orwell lived in the rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th arrondissement.

George Orwell began to write novels, including an early version of Burmese Days, but nothing else survives from that period.

George Orwell fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hopital Cochin, a free hospital where medical students were trained.

George Orwell became acquainted with many local people, including Brenda Salkeld, the clergyman's daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix Girls' School.

George Orwell renewed friendships with older friends, such as Dennis Collings, whose girlfriend Eleanor Jacques was to play a part in his life.

George Orwell then became tutor to three young brothers, one of whom, Richard Peters, later became a distinguished academic.

George Orwell went painting and bathing on the beach, and there he met Mabel and Francis Fierz, who later influenced his career.

George Orwell often stayed at the homes of Ruth Pitter and Richard Rees, where he could "change" for his sporadic tramping expeditions.

George Orwell was spending time with Eleanor Jacques, but her attachment to Dennis Collings remained an obstacle to his hopes of a more serious relationship.

George Orwell returned to teaching at Hayes and prepared for the publication of his book, now known as Down and Out in Paris and London.

George Orwell wished to publish under a different name to avoid any embarrassment to his family over his time as a "tramp".

George Orwell acquired a motorcycle and took trips through the surrounding countryside.

George Orwell was taken to a cottage hospital in Uxbridge, where for a time his life was believed to be in danger.

George Orwell was disappointed when Gollancz turned down Burmese Days, mainly on the grounds of potential suits for libel, but Harper were prepared to publish it in the United States.

George Orwell was sharing the job with Jon Kimche, who lived with the Westropes.

George Orwell was writing for the Adelphi and preparing A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days for publication.

George Orwell remained until the end of January 1936, when he stopped working at Booklovers' Corner.

George Orwell had written to Hilton seeking lodging and asking for recommendations on his route.

On 31 January 1936, George Orwell set out by public transport and on foot.

George Orwell made visits to his sister at Headingley, during which he visited the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth.

George Orwell needed somewhere he could concentrate on writing his book, and help was provided by Aunt Nellie, who was living at Wallington, Hertfordshire in a very small 16th-century cottage called the "Stores".

George Orwell took over the tenancy and moved in on 2 April 1936.

George Orwell tested the possibility of reopening the Stores as a village shop.

Gollancz feared the second half would offend readers and added a disculpatory preface to the book while George Orwell was in Spain.

Shortly afterwards, the political crisis began in Spain and George Orwell followed developments there closely.

Not wishing to commit himself until he had seen the situation in situ, George Orwell instead used his Independent Labour Party contacts to get a letter of introduction to John McNair in Barcelona.

George Orwell set out for Spain on about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way.

George Orwell was at first exasperated by this "kaleidoscope" of political parties and trade unions.

The ILP was linked to the POUM so George Orwell joined the POUM.

George Orwell had to spend some days in hospital with a poisoned hand and had most of his possessions stolen by the staff.

George Orwell returned to the front and saw some action in a night attack on the Nationalist trenches where he chased an enemy soldier with a bayonet and bombed an enemy rifle position.

George Orwell spent much of the time on a roof, with a stack of novels, but encountered Jon Kimche from his Hampstead days during the stay.

George Orwell expressed surprise that they should still want him, because according to the Communist press he was a fascist.

Unable to speak, and with blood pouring from his mouth, George Orwell was carried on a stretcher to Sietamo, loaded on an ambulance and sent to hospital in Lleida.

George Orwell recovered sufficiently to get up and on 27 May 1937 was sent on to Tarragona and two days later to a POUM sanatorium in the suburbs of Barcelona.

George Orwell received electrotherapy treatment and was declared medically unfit for service.

The trial of the leaders of the POUM and of George Orwell took place in Barcelona in October and November 1938.

George Orwell returned to England in June 1937, and stayed at the O'Shaughnessy home at Greenwich.

George Orwell found his views on the Spanish Civil War out of favour, but praised the book Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war by Juan Ramon Brea and Mary Stanley Low in a review for Time and Tide magazine.

George Orwell returned to Wallington, which he found in disarray after his absence.

George Orwell acquired goats, a cockerel he called Henry Ford and a poodle puppy he called Marx; and settled down to animal husbandry and writing Homage to Catalonia.

George Orwell was admitted to Preston Hall Sanatorium at Aylesford, Kent, a British Legion hospital for ex-servicemen to which his brother-in-law Laurence O'Shaughnessy was attached.

The novelist L H Myers secretly funded a trip to French Morocco for half a year for Orwell to avoid the English winter and recover his health.

George Orwell spent time in Wallington and Southwold working on ann essay about Charles Dickens.

George Orwell submitted his name to the Central Register for war work, but nothing transpired.

George Orwell returned to Wallington, and in late 1939 he wrote material for his first collection of essays, Inside the Whale.

George Orwell shared Tom Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard as a revolutionary People's Militia.

George Orwell applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Air Ministry.

George Orwell took part in radio broadcasts for the Eastern Service of the BBC.

George Orwell supervised cultural broadcasts to India, to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links.

David Astor was looking for a provocative contributor for The Observer Sunday newspaper, and invited George Orwell to write for him; the first article appeared in March 1942.

At the BBC, George Orwell introduced Voice, a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left.

In March 1943, George Orwell's mother died, and around this time he told Moore he was starting work on a book, which turned out to be Animal Farm.

In September 1943, George Orwell resigned from the BBC following a report confirming his fears that few Indians listened to the broadcasts, but he was keen to concentrate on writing Animal Farm.

George Orwell resigned from the Home Guard on medical grounds.

In November 1943, George Orwell was appointed literary editor at Tribune, where his assistant was his friend Jon Kimche.

George Orwell was on the staff until early 1945, writing over 80 book reviews, and on 3 December 1943 started his regular personal column "As I Please".

George Orwell was still writing reviews for other magazines, including Partisan Review, Horizon, and the New York Nation.

George Orwell had to scrabble around in the rubble for his books, which he had finally managed to transfer from Wallington, carting them away in a wheelbarrow.

George Orwell went to liberated Paris, then to Germany and Austria, to cities including Cologne and Stuttgart.

George Orwell had not given Orwell much notice about the operation because of worries about the cost, and because she expected to make a speedy recovery; however she died on 29 March 1945 of an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given.

George Orwell returned to London to cover the 1945 general election at the beginning of July.

George Orwell employed a housekeeper, Susan Watson, to look after his adopted son at the Islington flat, which visitors now described as "bleak".

In late 1945 and early 1946 George Orwell made several hopeless and unwelcome marriage proposals to younger women, including Celia Kirwan; Ann Popham, who happened to live in the same block of flats; and Sonia Brownell, one of Connolly's coterie at the Horizon office.

George Orwell suffered a tubercular haemorrhage in February 1946 but disguised his illness.

In 1945 or early 1946, while still living at Canonbury Square, George Orwell wrote an article on "British Cookery", complete with recipes, commissioned by the British Council.

On 22 May 1946, George Orwell set off with his two-year-old son, who he treated as a mini-adult, to live on Jura in Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse without outbuildings.

George Orwell's son found out later that Orwell was terrified of passing on his tuberculosis to him by hugging or kissing him, and concerned that this would interfere with his bonding with the child.

George Orwell returned to London in late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again.

Tuberculosis was diagnosed and the request for permission to import the new medicine streptomycin to treat George Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health.

David Astor helped with supply and payment and George Orwell began his course of streptomycin on 19 or 20 February 1948.

George Orwell was writing to many of his friends, including Jacintha Buddicom, who had "rediscovered" him.

In March 1949 he was visited by Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, set up by the Labour government to publish anti-communist propaganda; George Orwell gave her a list of people he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings.

George Orwell then received penicillin, presumably to treat his bronchiectasis; doctors knew it was ineffective against tuberculosis.

Friends of George Orwell stated that Brownell helped him through the painful last months of his life and, according to Anthony Powell, cheered George Orwell up greatly.

In September 1949, George Orwell invited his accountant Jack Harrison to visit him at the hospital, and Harrison claimed that George Orwell then asked him to become director of GOP Ltd and to manage the company, but there was no independent witness.

George Orwell's wedding took place in the hospital room on 13 October 1949, with David Astor as best man.

At the age of 46, George Orwell suffered a pulmonary artery rupture due to complications of tuberculosis, and died in the early morning of 21 January 1950.

George Orwell had requested to be buried in accordance with the Anglican rite in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die.

David Astor arranged for George Orwell to be interred in the churchyard of All Saints' Church, Sutton Courtenay.

George Orwell's adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair, was brought up by George Orwell's sister Avril, his legal guardian, and her husband, Bill Dunn.

George Orwell was considered to have a strong case, but was becoming increasingly ill and eventually was persuaded to settle out of court on 2 November 1980.

Elsewhere, George Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book The Road.

George Orwell was an admirer of Arthur Koestler and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn in the Vale of Ffestiniog.

George Orwell reviewed Koestler's Darkness at Noon for the New Statesman in 1941, saying:.

George Orwell's reviews are well known and have had an influence on literary criticism.

George Orwell wrote in the conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens,.

George Orwell is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.

George Orwell considered this Shaw's best play and the most likely to remain socially relevant.

George Orwell accused The Ministry of Information of exaggerating Wodehouse's actions for propaganda purposes.

In 1946, the British Council commissioned George Orwell to write an essay on British food as part of a drive to promote British relations abroad.

George Orwell wrote that high tea in the United Kingdom consisted of a variety of savoury and sweet dishes, but "no tea would be considered a good one if it did not include at least one kind of cake", before adding "as well as cakes, biscuits are much eaten at tea-time".

George Orwell included his own recipe for marmalade, a popular British spread on toast.

George Orwell's work has taken a prominent place in the school literature curriculum in England, with Animal Farm a regular examination topic at the end of secondary education, and Nineteen Eighty-Four a topic for subsequent examinations below university level.

Deutscher argued that George Orwell had struggled to comprehend the dialectical philosophy of Marxism, demonstrated personal ambivalence towards other strands of socialism and his works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four had been appropriated for the purpose of anti-communist Cold War propaganda.

George Orwell worked as a journalist at The Observer for seven years, and its editor David Astor gave a copy of this celebrated essay to every new recruit.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a totalitarian government that controlled thought by controlling language, making certain ideas literally unthinkable.

George Orwell may have been the first to use the term "cold war" in his essay, "You and the Atom Bomb", published in Tribune on 19 October 1945.

The George Orwell Society was formed in 2011 to promote understanding of the life and work of George Orwell.

University College London holds an extensive collection of George Orwell's books, including rare and early editions of his works, translations into other languages and titles from his own library.

George Orwell quoted his sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms: "I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'".

Jacintha Buddicom repudiated George Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that "he was a specially happy child".

Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about George Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself".

George Orwell enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits, and conducting experiments as in cooking a hedgehog or shooting down a jackdaw from the Eton roof to dissect it.

George Orwell liked women and had many girlfriends I think in Burma.

George Orwell had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London.

George Orwell was rather a womaniser, yet he was afraid he wasn't attractive.

When George Orwell was in the sanatorium in Kent, his wife Eileen's friend Lydia Jackson visited.

George Orwell had an affair with his secretary at Tribune which caused Eileen much distress, and others have been mooted.

George Orwell was very lonely after Eileen's death in 1945 and was desperate for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard.

George Orwell proposed marriage to four women, including Celia Kirwan, and eventually Sonia Brownell accepted.

George Orwell had met her when she was assistant to Cyril Connolly, at Horizon literary magazine.

George Orwell was noted for very close and enduring friendships with a few friends, but these were generally people with a similar background or with a similar level of literary ability.

George Orwell just did not have much in common with people who did not share his intellectual interests.

One biography of George Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak.

When sharing a flat with George Orwell, Heppenstall came home late one night in an advanced stage of loud inebriation.

When he complained, George Orwell hit him across the legs with a shooting stick and Heppenstall then had to defend himself with a chair.

Some, like Michael Ayrton, called him "Gloomy George Orwell", but others developed the idea that he was an "English secular saint".

George Orwell advocated a patriotic defence of a British way of life that could not be trusted to intellectuals or, by implication, the state:.

George Orwell appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately, despised drinkers of lager, and wrote about an imagined, ideal British pub in his 1946 Evening Standard article, "The Moon Under Water".

George Orwell preferred traditional English dishes, such as roast beef, and kippers.

George Orwell's attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size-12 boots, was a source of amusement.

David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according to the Special Branch dossier, George Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist".

George Orwell was an atheist who identified himself with the humanist outlook on life.

George Orwell was well-read in Biblical literature and could quote lengthy passages from the Book of Common Prayer from memory.

The literary critic James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "George Orwell was on the humanist side, of course".

George Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular.

George Orwell liked to provoke arguments by challenging the status quo, but he was a traditionalist with a love of old English values.

George Orwell criticised and satirised, from the inside, the various social milieux in which he found himself.

George Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay "Toward European Unity", which first appeared in Partisan Review.

George Orwell left the ILP because of its opposition to the war and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism".

George Orwell is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds.

George Orwell joined the staff of Tribune magazine as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing Labour-supporting democratic socialist.

The dossier, published by The National Archives, states that, according to one investigator, George Orwell had "advanced Communist views and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings".

George Orwell's will requested that no biography of him be written, and his widow, Sonia Brownell, repelled every attempt by those who tried to persuade her to let them write about him.

George Orwell did appoint Malcolm Muggeridge as official biographer, but later biographers have seen this as deliberate spoiling as Muggeridge eventually gave up the work.

Peter Davison's publication of the Complete Works of George Orwell, completed in 2000, made most of the Orwell Archive accessible to the public.

Jeffrey Meyers, a prolific American biographer, was first to take advantage of this and published a book in 2001 that investigated the darker side of George Orwell and questioned his saintly image.

Why George Orwell Matters was published by Christopher Hitchens in 2002.

Celia Kirwan's family intervened in the discussion, believing that the attribution to their relative of a relationship with George Orwell, as stated by Funder, is false.