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Anthony Burgess
1985
London: Hutchinson, 1978
Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame celebrated thirty years of Nineteen Eighty-Four with his 1985. It is in two parts: a discussion of Orwell and freedom, and a novella updating Winston Smith’s struggle. (more…)
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“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” (more…)
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David Ryan
George Orwell on Screen
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2018
This book took me down a rabbit hole when I discovered it last June. For several days I didn’t want to do anything but watch old television dramatizations and documentaries about George Orwell’s works and life. There have been a surprising number of them, and most of the key ones can be found online or in other digital media. (more…)
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1. John Sutherland
Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography
London: Reaktion Books, 2016
This small but brilliant volume is a joy to read, maybe the best single Orwell critique in recent years. “A Quirky and Snarky Treat” somebody at Amazon called it, and that it certainly is. “The lower classes smell,” Orwell famously offers as an upper-class folk belief, in The Road to Wigan Pier. (more…)
Soviet propaganda poster from 1931 telling the workers that the 5-year plan can be completed in 4 years with enough enthusiasm.
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4. Doublethink
Among the many useful concepts bequeathed to us by Orwell, “doublethink” tops the list. It is a priceless tool for understanding how “normies” function within the repressive, PC societies of the West. The novel offers us two separate discussions of doublethink, which complement each other. The first occurs early in the story, and is the most famous passage dealing with the term:
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Part 1 (Part 2 here)
1. Introduction
Everyone thinks he knows what’s in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Is there really anything left to say? It’s as if George Orwell’s masterpiece has been sucked dry. At least, that’s what I thought until I recently reread it, for the first time in over thirty years. (more…)
O’Brien (Richard Burton) demonstrates that 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.
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Did the international crises of 1947 and 1948 leave their mark on the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four? I’ve spent a lot of time on this question, and so far as I can tell, the answer is – yes; but only obliquely. And George Orwell may not even have been conscious of the fact.
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June 8th is the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greg Johnson interviews Margot Metroland on some of Orwell’s sources and influences, the loosely “Trotskyite” political context in which he wrote, and the possibility that he was bumped off by Stalinists. (more…)
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Connolly, Burnham, Orwell, & “Corner Table”
“In the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949
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If you’re seeing a lot of Nineteen Eighty-Four editions showing up in bookstores these days, it’s because 2019 marks the seventieth anniversary of the novel’s publication. (more…)
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Henry Williamson
Today is the birthday of Henry Williamson (Dec. 1, 1895 – Aug. 13, 1977)—ruralist author, war historian, journalist, farmer, and visionary of British fascism.
Two rather incongruous points of Williamson’s life stand out. One is that he achieved fame with what is usually regarded as a children’s book, Tarka the Otter (originally published 1927, with a movie version in 1979).
The other is that he was a friend of Lawrence of Arabia; and that it was on his way back from posting a letter to Williamson that T. E. Lawrence was mysteriously killed in a motorcycle accident. (more…)
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George Orwell’s classic essay “Politics and the English Language” ostensibly teaches us how to write well. More importantly, however, it teaches us how to think well before we write. According to Orwell, slovenly thought leads to slovenly writing as much as slovenly writing leads back to slovenly thought. In this essay, Orwell derides the politics of his day as being imbued with conformity of expression and the distancing of this expression from Truth. (more…)
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There’s a story about George Orwell’s death that’s been bubbling up from the underground for the past 20 years or so. To the best of my knowledge it’s never been published anywhere. And this is odd indeed, because all the essential pieces have been out on public display for a long time—in biographies, memoirs, and newspaper headlines. Anyone, almost anyone who cares to, can connect the dots.
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On Saturday, March 7th, 2015, I sat down with Tito Perdue and his wife Judy in Atlanta and interviewed him about his life and work. (more…)
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English original here
Ray Bradbury, spisovatel nejlépe známý díky románůmMarťanská kronika, 451 stupňů Fahrenheita, a autor stovek dalších povídek, zemřel 5. června 2012 ve věku 91 let. S jeho osobou ztrácí Amerika nejen jednoho ze svých nejlepších spisovatelů, ale také jednoho z našich posledních skutečných spisovatelů.
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Editor’s Note:
The following text is a transcript of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture, “Nineteen Eighty-Four and Totalitarian Leftism,” which was delivered to the 23rd New Right meeting in London on September 26, 2009. In editing this transcription, I introduced punctuation and paragraph breaks. I also deleted a couple of false starts. You can listen to the lecture at YouTube here. Several bits were unintelligible and are marked as such. If you can understand these words, please post a comment below. (more…)
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Czech translation here
Ray Bradbury, the writer best known for his novels The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, as well as a hundreds of short stories, passed away on Tuesday, June 5 at the age of 91. With him we have lost not only one of America’s greatest writers, but also one of our last genuine writers.
However, I don’t use either of these words – genuine or writer – lightly. (more…)
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Whatever happened to the Age of Anxiety? In the post-war years, intellectuals left and right were constantly telling us — left and right — that we were living in an age of breakdown and decay. (more…)
The poster for Michael Radford’s movie adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
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George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
William Butler Yeats, 1865–1939
227 words
“W. B. Yeats” (1943)
“Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern world, science, machinery, the concept of progress—above all, of the idea of human equality.”
“How do Yeats’s political ideas link up with his leaning towards occultism? (more…)
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Alex Kurtagic
Mister
Foreword by Tomislav Sunic
Guildford, U.K.: Iron Sky Publishing, 2009
Imagine a novel that is a marriage of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and Jean Raspail’s depressing account of the genocide of Europeans, The Camp of the Saints.