George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), born in Motihari, India, and educated at Eton. He served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, lived among the poor of Paris and London for Down and Out in Paris and London, and fought with a POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot in the throat; Homage to Catalonia records that war. After wartime work at the BBC and as literary editor of Tribune he wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he died of tuberculosis in London in January 1950.
Animal Farm is a short beast fable about a revolution that turns into a tyranny. On Manor Farm near Willingdon in England, the old prize boar Major gathers the animals one night and describes a dream of a world without Man, who takes their milk, eggs and labour and sends them to the knacker when they are old.
Politics and the English Language is an essay of about five thousand words by George Orwell, first published in the London literary monthly Horizon in April 1946, in the months after the Second World War when he was beginning Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that careless English and dishonest politics feed each other, and that the process can be reversed by writers who take trouble over their words.
