Do we need George Orwell Day?

I doubt that George Orwell needs ‘George Orwell Day’. Aldous Huxley, Henry Green, J.G. Ballard, each of those dead writers might benefit from a bit of sponsorship, and so might we. But Orwell? His spirit pervades our times, and with good reason. Orwell may have recognised some of the ill that our politics and era are producing, a point that Fraser reiterated in a Coffee House post earlier today. The ‘snooping bill’, CCTV, politically correct language – one might see fictional antecedents of those unpleasant realities in the pages of 1984. And perhaps social division caused by polarised wealth and the privations brought by economic decline can be seen in the pages of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

Prophecy will only get you so far in understanding why Orwell endures. There was, obviously, more to Orwell than Big Brother, the Thought Police and Room 101.