We thoroughly enjoyed holding events at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival for the first time – and we hope that, via video, you enjoy them too.
You can watch our ‘Victorian Values’ debate, with social historian Jose Harris, author of Chavs Owen Jones and co-author of Jilted Generation Shiv Malik, chaired by Julia Wheeler, on our website and on our YouTube Channel. Our panellists look at the concepts of the deserving and undeserving poor, social mobility, and poverty through the ages – and much more besides – in an excellent hour of discussion.
We also have video of this year’s Orwell Prize for Blogs winner, Graeme Archer, and previously longlisted Oliver Kamm of The Times, in another great conversation about political blogging. Is the left or right better at group blogging? Has blogging’s style ‘infected’ national newspapers? And would preventing anonymous commenting lead to higher quality, polite discussion? Watch Graeme and Oliver to see what they thought.
Orwell Prize 2012 Launch
It’s that time of year again – almost. We’ll be announcing full details of this year’s Orwell Prize launch next week. But you might want to keep 9 November free…
George Orwell Memorial Lecture 2011
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media, will be speaking on ‘Hacking away at the truth: an investigation and its consequences’ on 10th November at 6pm. Email events@bbk.ac.uk to book a free place, or visit our website for more information.
The Orwell Lecture is organised by the Orwell Trust with Birkbeck College, University of London.
From the archive
Alan Rusbridger joins a stellar line-up of Orwell lecturers. We have video of the three most recent: Ferdinand Mount on ‘Orwell and the Oligarchs’, based on Orwell’s ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’; Hilary Mantel, lecturing on Thomas Cromwell (the subject of her Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall); and Andrew O’Hagan, on ‘The English’. You can also read Michael Rosen’s 2007 lecture on reading and the ‘politics of response’.
Orwell’s ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ was first published this week in 1945, and is new to our website. The essay imagines a world carved up into three superstates with the threat of nuclear annihilation keeping them in perpetual war – not unlike Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other notable dates this week include the birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – whose Xanadu Orwell considers in his essay, ‘Pleasure Spots’ – and Trafalgar Day, Orwell writing of Trafalgar and patriotism in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’.
From elsewhere
- Orwell’s essay, ‘Hop-picking’, was first published by the New Statesman and Nation on 17 October 1931 – read it on our site
- A production of Burmese Days by aya theatre is to open off-Broadway – discover more by and about Orwell and Burma on our Burmese Days page
- Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending – he wrote about Orwell for the New York Review of Books in 2009
- It was a controversial year for the Booker, with many literary critics debating the merits of the prize and the shortlist – a good time, then, to read Orwell’s ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’
- The T. S. Eliot Prize announced its shortlist – there’s plenty of, and on, Orwell’s poetry on our site (including an extract from Eliot)
- It’s one year since the UK government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, which was the subject of our launch debate last year
- And Norman Bissell will be talking about ‘George Orwell: The Socialist Who Loved Nature’ in Edinburgh on 29 October – Orwell’s ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ and Coming Up for Air are suitable background reading
The Wartime Diaries
The next entry will be published on 14th March.
The Hop-Picking Diaries
The final entry was published on 8th October.
The Wigan Pier Diaries
The final entry was published on 25th March.
If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter.
And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.
