Anybody with a few quid to spare should bid for it if they haven’t got it. (It’s not me selling, I should add.)

He’s like Einstein in that respect.

Or to put that another way, he was an excellent political writer. A short definition of good rhetoric is making your case seem obvious, indeed inescapable, to others.

On the “Orwell was a traitor” meme, I think it’s a beatup. The body he gave the celebrated list to was the Information Research Department, an agency of the Foreign Office that commissioned anti-communist propaganda. The worst that happened to anybody on the list was therefore that they didn’t receive commissions they would have refused anyway. And I’d say there was a damn good case against communism in 1948. 1948! When Stalin had just got around to reinvigorating the terror after its wartime relaxation! The year of the coup in Czechoslovakia!

More broadly, I’m currently rereading the Essays and it horrifies me that John Major got away with buggering “The Lion and the Unicorn” as far out of context as he did. And “Politics and the English Language” is a masterpiece.

You mentioned ‘democracy’ in your post, and it reminded me of a passage in Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling, about his experiences as a hostage in Beirut:

“Some terrorists wear pin-stripe suits … they hide their terrorism behind institutions of law or social regulation that have more to do with control than liberation. This terror maintains the status quo and power brokerage in the hands of a select few. Democracy has become a myth-word. It has a magical quality. One has only to speak it and people bow down to it and worship it without knowing their own surrender.”

That was written in 1992, for God’s sake.

Thank you, thank you, all this time I thought it was just me!

I wanted to put up a post the other day of his best political quotes, but thought it might not go down too well with the boss…

I’ll probably just hide it in the archives and add a subtle link somewhere…

Both things are fun, and thus both have a place, unless I’m feeling exceptionally pretentious, or wanting to annoy Americans…

and my stolen contribution to the American/English political nonsense debate…

“Political gibberish is not a purely American art form, like jazz and safety blitz. But in only 200 years we have raised it to a new level of eloquence beyond anything since the time of the Caesars or even Genghis Khan” – Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

Then I went to college and discovered Raymond Williams. (His book on Orwell is excellent, incidentally, but I’d recommend you get properly immersed in Orwell before you read it.) Both Orwell and Williams put their trust in the workers, but Williams was thinking of the people he had grown up with. Orwell put his trust in the workers precisely because he didn’t know them – and he felt that everyone he did know had let him down.

Phil and Jamie: I’m only vaguely aware of the criticisms against Orwell and I’m actually looking forward to getting to the bottom of them. I know he’s accused of shopping some communist mates to MI5 or whoever but apart from that I know very little.

Kathy and Katie: Well, I read the speech (another political speech after Blair’s and Brown’s was a big ask) and I have to admit it was a good one. Even allowing for the lack of context and his delivery it’s as good an evocation of the American Dream as you’re likely to hear without the common descent into the unthinking saccharine (see W’s folksy downhome routine) that us cynical Brits detest.

Paul: I know what you mean about using a wider vocabulary but I also remember what a teacher told when I was a kid: just because he was more educated than we were didn’t make him more intelligent. The idea of getting (semi-)complex ideas across in a simpler way to people who can understand and consider them but don’t necessarily have the educational background or possess a wider vocabulary is a seductive one for me. Not least because you’re able to share ideas with a wider audience.