What They Do Not Want To Hear

Radio Four's Book of the Week is a biography of George Orwell's first wife simply as such. What is it with these people and Orwell? Two clunkingly unsubtle novels are force-fed to middle set teenagers, and what else could almost anyone tell you that he had ever written?

There is a statue of Orwell at the headquarters of the BBC, and he is on the same National Curriculum that says that Britain's only role in the slave trade was to end it, while ignoring everything that the British working class had ever done. At best, he is a licensed left-wing impersonator of the kind that now writes for The Guardian, although the stage army of theatrically right-wing columnists does not quote them approvingly, so he is not even that. Britain's first ever animated feature film was an adaptation of Animal Farm, and it was funded entirely by the CIA. Well, of course it was.