Andrew Norfolk and Tom Bergin have shared the Orwell Prize for Journalism for their work for The Times and Reuters respectively, it was announced at a ceremony in London last night. AT Williams wins the Orwell Book Prize for A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa, published by Jonathan Cape. On the Front Line, by the late Marie Colvin, wins the Orwell Special Prize. The Orwell Prize is sponsored and supported by the Media Standards Trust, Political Quarterly, literary agents AM Heath and Richard Blair (George Orwell’s son).
On May 16th, 1948 wrote to Evelyn Waugh from his bed in Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride:
I am indebted to you for a very good and sympathetic review in “The Tablet” [the intellectual Catholic weekly] of my book of essays. In discussing the one on P. G. Wodehouse, you mentioned the “pacifist strain” in his writings. This started me thinking about him again, and on looking up a rare early book called “The Gold Bat” I found passages that suggested that Wodehouse had had some kind of connection with the Liberal Party, about 1908, when it was the anti-militarist party. I will add a footnote to this effect if I ever reprint the essays.
I am here being treated for tuberculosis, but they seem to have made a good job of my case, and I hope to get out some time during the summer.
A few days later, in his literary notebook, Orwell added the following lines:
Things not foreseen in youth as part of middle age.
Perpetual tired feeling in legs, aching knees. Stiffness amounting to pain in small of back & down loins. Discomfort in gums. Chest more or less always constricted. Feeling in the morning of being almost unable to stand up. Sensation of cold whenever the sun is not shining. Wind on the stomach (making it difficult to think). Eyes always watering.
As painful as a grapestone under a dental plate
As noisy as a mouse in a packet of macaroni
As haughty as a fishmonger
