George Orwell

George Orwell wrote two books that entered political language everywhere and spent his career attacking totalitarianism from the left. Born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903 to a father in the opium department of the Indian civil service, he was educated on a scholarship at Eton, where he was conscious of being poorer than his classmates. He served five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922, resigned in disgust at what he had been enforcing, and wrote Shooting an Elephant and Burmese Days out of it. He then lived deliberately among the destitute in Paris and London, producing Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933, and was commissioned to report on unemployment in the north for The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937. He went to Spain in December 1936 to report and joined the POUM militia instead, was shot through the throat by a sniper at Huesca, and then had to flee Barcelona as the Soviet-backed communists suppressed their allies on the left. Homage to Catalonia recorded it, sold about 700 copies, and fixed his lifelong conviction: that Stalinism was a lie sustained by the falsification of history. Animal Farm, finished in 1944, was rejected by several publishers unwilling to attack a wartime ally, including by T. S. Eliot at Faber, and appeared in 1945 to immediate success. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Hebridean island of Jura while dying of tuberculosis, and it was published in June 1949. It supplied Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime and Newspeak. His essay Politics and the English Language argues that debased language enables political deception. He died in January 1950, aged forty-six.

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