JOLLY DAYS

Orwell's Blog

George Orwell's diaries are being presented online as a blog, 70 years later, to the day.

In the introduction to the blog they say you may see something of the face of the acute Orwell in the entries that follow, as Orwell himself noted about the impression one has of the person behind any strong creative work. Orwell is quoted,

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

“All the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” There you go.