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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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George Orwell
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(pseudonym of Eric Blair, 1903–50) Novelist, essayist and author of two of the most successful political fables of the 20C. Born in India and educated at Eton, he returned to the east for his first employment – with the British police in Burma (1922–7). It was a formative but most unsuitable setting for a man of his political sympathies, and he reacted by spending the following years in the vagrancy which he described in *Down and Out in Paris and London.
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His observations of everyday working-class conditions during the Depression were expressed in The *Road to Wigan Pier, and he described in Homage to Catalonia (1938) his experiences fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Although a committed Socialist, he was never a man to toe a party line; and hatred of repressive orthodoxy of any kind lay behind his two last books, the fables which brought him a far wider readership than before, *Animal Farm and *Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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