George Orwell, the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, was born
in Bengal, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton and became a
policeman in Burma. After leaving the police, he began to
investigate the poverty in India and Europe which shaped his
thinking about equality, money and power. His great works, Animal
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are a product of his hatred of
totalitarianism in all its forms and he was as critical of Stalin
in the 1930s as he was ready to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil
War. His legacy of writing and political thought is much admired
today. He died of tuberculosis in 1950.
John Sutherland is the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus
of Modern English Literature, UCL, and has taught at the University
of Edinburgh and the California Institute of Technology. A Fellow
of the Royal Society of Literature he is the author of many books
and articles including the well-received Orwell's Nose: A
Pathological Biography in 2016 and Stephen Spender: The Authorized
Biography (2004).
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