George Orwell
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box." --"England Your England", George Orwell, first published in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) "He broke the power of what Nabokov enjoyed calling "Bolshevik propaganda" over the minds of liberal intellectuals in England and America. He thereby put us twenty years ahead of our French opposite numbers. They had to wait for The Gulag Archipelago before they stopped thinking that liberal hope required the conviction that things behind the Iron Curtain would necessarily get better, and stopped thinking that solidarity against the capitalists required ignoring what the Communist oligarchs were doing." --CIS |
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Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a novelist, critic, political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general, and Stalinism in particular: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both were written and published toward the end of his life.