George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author. Noted as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an accomplished novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the twentieth century. He is possibly best known for two novels written towards the end of his life, in the 1940s; the political allegory Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which describes a totalitarian dystopia so vividly that the adjective "Orwellian" is now used to describe totalitarian mechanisms of thought control.

Miscellaneous trivia

• Aldous Huxley was Orwell's French teacher for a term early in his Eton career.
• His wife Eileen was once a student of J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Despite being remembered for his radio broadcasts for the BBC during the war no recording of Orwell speaking was known until 2002. The only known film footage of Orwell is from him at Eton playing the Eton Wall Game.
• Orwell had a Soviet secret police file — partly due to his anti-Stalinist "Animal Farm".
• Orwell actually coined the term Cold War. In an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb" on October 19, 1945 in Tribune, Orwell wrote:

:"We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."

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