In his ‘London Letter’ to American readers dated 1 January 1942, Orwell mentions that Dylan Thomas is doing jobs for the BBC and the Ministry of Information. ‘So is nearly everybody that used to be a writer, and most of us rapidly going native.’ It implies that one cannot write for the government and still be a proper writer, but the tenor of this whole piece suggests the opposite.
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Attending a first night of a new musical play is exciting enough, but being there for the last night has more poignancy because it has either been a success or a failure. It was, on the particular last evening of our visit, immediately apparent from both the cast and the audience at the Greenwich Theatre that this three-night musical production has been an unqualified success – and will be travelling onwards.
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Parallel Worlds: George Orwell and Vasily Grossman,by Peter Davison Hearing John Baker speak at the PEN Conference in London in August 1944 led Orwell to make a serious start on what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four. Baker exposed the perversion of …
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