Showing posts with label George Orwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Orwell. Show all posts

Saturday, October 4, 2025

‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ Review: How George Came to See the World as Orwellian; The New York Times, October 2, 2025

 , The New York Times; ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ Review: How George Came to See the World as Orwellian

"“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, a year after the end of the World War II. That line appears early in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” an essayistic documentary from Raoul Peck that surveys its title subject’s life and work, using them as a lens to explore authoritarian power in the past and the present. Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

Peck plucked that observation about art and politics from Orwell’s essential 1946 essay “Why I Write,” in which he lists “four great motives for writing” — especially for writing prose and, of course, aside from earning a living — including “political purpose.” Near the end of the essay, Orwell writes that he hopes to start a new book. What soon followed was “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the seismic novel that helped turn his name into an adjective. Anchored by Orwell’s writing — and Damian Lewis’s calm, intimate voice-over — Peck charts the writer’s life in tandem with world-shattering events, focusing on when he was working on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published in 1949. Months later, Orwell was dead."

Friday, April 24, 2020

George Orwell, 1984

“War is peace. 
Freedom is slavery. 
Ignorance is strength.” 


― George Orwell, 1984

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Sir Harold Evans’ New Book Is a Master Class in How to Write; Daily Beast, May 20, 2017

Malcolm Jones, Daily Beast; Sir Harold Evans’ New Book Is a Master Class in How to Write

"Like George Orwell, Evans understands in his bones that words are not just pretty things, that in the wrong hands they can mislead, betray, and even cause great harm. Beginning on page one and running right through to the end of the book is an iron spine of fair play and honesty. “This book on clear writing is as concerned with how words confuse and mislead, with or without malice aforethought, as it is with literary expression,” he writes in the introduction, and then circles back on the last page of the book to drive home the point once more: “The fog that envelops English is not just a question of good taste, style, and esthetics. It is a moral issue.”"