Making It, Faking It

The Political Pen

Orwell: The Rewrite

Comrade Inconstant

Artistic Differences

The Fab Two: Lennon and McCarney working with and against each other

Cold War Culture

Orwell, Koestler and the democratic left’s crusade against Stalinism

Spanish Sketches

Orwell and the Spanish anarchists: not judging murder too severely

Hergé’s Adventures in Politics

Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was one of many Belgians to respond to an appeal from King Leopold to return to the country they had…

Two Legs Bad

A socialist society may be beyond us: morally we’re not up to it.

The Unknown Eileen

Had Eileen O’Shaughnessy not taken up with George Orwell, she might have found success, if not fame, in her own right, possibly as an academic…

Ins and Outs

Psychologist Henri Tajfel was an argumentative man and he encouraged similar aggressive attitudes in his colleagues and students. He tended to make up his mind…

Waiting for Big Brother

Most biography of Orwell carries the assumption that his whole writing life was a preparation for his final work. This may well be so: the…

Smile, and turn up the power

In a Yale experiment in the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram found that large numbers of ordinary, inoffensive people were prepared to administer painful electric…

The Glimmer

Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with the total defeat of its rebellious protagonist Winston Smith. Or so it seems. But if the victory of the Party seemed…

Starving Them Out

The naval blockade of Germany during the First World War is a subject that is little treated today. Yet estimates of civilian deaths caused by…

Them and Us

A classic experiment in social psychology and group antagonism now looks as if it was manipulated to produce the results required by the preceding theory.…

The Quixote of Cant

George Orwell set himself the mission of uncovering and ‘calling out’ all forms of political lying and evasion, particularly those of the people he called…