Tag: George Orwell

Orwell’s passport photo from his time in Burma.

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When did Eric A. Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, lose his virginity? Most biographers haven’t wrestled much with this particular issue. But then came along John Sutherland, a retired academic who published an entertaining book called Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography back in 2016. (I briefly described this cute volume in a 2019 end-of-year Favorite Books wrap-up.)

John Sutherland, bless his soul, spends about half his book reconstructing the carnal history of E. A. Blair. (more…)

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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 120th birthday on June 25.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. (more…)

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By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. (more…)

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Michael Malice
The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil
Independently Published, 2022

What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand (AR). It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. (more…)

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Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. — George Orwell, 1984

American college students have said, ‘Like 1984, man’, when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading. — Anthony Burgess, 1985

I made a half-hearted New Year’s resolution not to mention Orwell’s 1984 this year, not once. Like most of these Janus-faced pledges, however, it didn’t last long. But hasn’t the book been over-visited? (more…)

Barricade of the Communard National Guard, Paris, March 18, 1871.

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Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Introduction here, Chapter 9 Part 2 here, Chapter 10 Part 1 here

The Revolution of 1789 was itself above all a liberal and bourgeois revolution — even “ultra-liberal,” as the very liberal Gaspard Koenig affirms, not failing to celebrate this. (more…)

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Introduction here, Chapter 8 here, Chapter 9 Part 2 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

The ecologist Fabrice Nicolino, a member of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial board (he was seriously wounded in the Kouachi brothers’ attack in January 2015), declares:

I am nostalgic for a time when people had a place, when men and women were strongly bound. I am nostalgic for a time when rural civilization was not the garbage it is today, a monstrosity that stuffs people with pesticides. (more…)

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Advanced robotics

Brassneck was a cartoon robot schoolboy from a popular comic I read as a young lad in the 1960s, The Dandy. Older British readers will also remember this comic’s great rival, The Beano, and Dennis the Menace (which was very different from the American Dennis). (more…)

Jean-Claude Michéa

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Introduction here, Chapter 4 Part 2 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

In January 1905, the regulations of the French Section of the Workers’ International, the Socialist Party of the time, still indicated that it was a “class party whose goal was to socialize the means of production and exchange, i.e. to transform capitalist society into a collectivist or Communist society, and that its means to this end was the economic and political organization of the proletariat.” Of course, no “socialist” party would dare say this today. Socialists have mutated into social-democrats and, increasingly, into social-liberals. (more…)

Kdo zabil Orwella? Nejstudenější člověk, „Bába“ Gow?

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English original here

Jistá pověst tradovaná o smrti George Orwella se už posledních více než 20 let usilovně snaží prodrat na povrch hlavního proudu. Pokud vím, nebyla zatím nikde otištěna, což je poněkud zvláštní, protože všechny její hlavní součásti jsou už dlouho veřejně dostupné a známé: v životopisech, memoárech i novinových titulcích. Kdokoliv, tedy skoro kdokoliv, koho celá věc zajímá, si dávno mohl dát dvě a dvě dohromady. (more…)

Royal commentator Hilary Fordwich recently stood up for Britain by owning Don Lemon on his own show when he brought up slavery reparations.

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No pal of mine

Free speech and skepticism are or should be two central pillars of civilization, so it is no surprise to see them under attack from the British deep state and its provisional wing in the guise of Big Tech. (more…)

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Australian nationalist activist Blair Cottrell was Nick Jeelvy‘s guest on the most recent broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc where they discussed the phenomenon of pharmacology and its origins, as well as answer your questions, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)