A good review of Orwell: A Life in Letters (the companion to Orwell’s Diaries that was released last year) in the Telegraph last week.
When I talk books Orwell often comes up. I have an (odd/varied) Anglophobe bent (Woodhouse, O’Brien, Rushdie, Naipal, Hardy) which is partly due to the fact that the language is just different enough for me to have to engage the forebrain.
Much of this stems from the musings of Christopher Hitchens. I began to read Orwell once I saw the In Depth episode on C-Span.
Hitchens was the owner (according to him) of “everything Orwell had ever written from 1984 to his laundry receipts.”
Orwell’s prose draws you in because he lays a subject bare in the simplest language. You look at the surface and it seems plain, but once you digest you realize it’s as right as it could be.
Heffer’s conclusion on Orwell’s letters: “Ah, well: it is reassuring that the gods will still give us faults to make us men.”
You read PG Wodehouse? You’re shitting me.
If only I could describe a clients reluctance to adopt Paleo like:
“I suppose when two men of Iron Will live in close association with one another, there are bound to be occasional clashes, and one of these had recently popped up in the Wooster House. Jeeves was trying to be me to go on a Round-the-World cruise, and I would have none of it. But in spite of my firm statements to this effect, scarcely a day passed without him bringing me a sheaf or a nosegay of those illustrated folders which the Ho-for-the-open-spaces birds sent out in the hope of drumming up some custom. His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind of that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.”
Just tell them to get outside some eggs and b.