Buxton Festival video

Friday 05 August 2011

You can now watch video of our debate at the Buxton Festival, ‘is politics corrupted by corrupted language?’, on our website and YouTube channel. The line-up was slightly different from that advertised, with journalists Colette Douglas-Home (columnist, The Herald) and Mark Douglas-Home (former editor, The Herald) joining Linda Grant (Orange Prize-winning and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, books include the recent We Had It So Good) and Matthew Parris (journalist and former MP, winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005, previously shortlisted for Chance Witness). Dame Janet Smith, High Court judge and chair of the Buxton Festival, presided over the discussion. Nick Cohen (journalist and author, previously shortlisted for What’s Left? and longlisted for Waiting for the Etonians) sadly had to pull out. Video of our previous events at Buxton – Andrea Gillies in conversation with her publisher Rebecca Nicolson, Andrew Brown in conversation with David Blunkett MP, a debate on Orwell vs Dickens, and a discussion on ‘what makes a good political novel?’ – can be found in our events archive.

Johann Hari

You may be aware of allegations made about the winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2008, Johann Hari, which have been investigated by our governing Council of the Orwell Prize. You can read the latest statement on our website.

From the archive

There’s been a lot of discussion about the death penalty this week, with the relaunch of the UK government’s e-petitions website. Orwell wrote about capital punishment in one of his most famous essays, ‘A Hanging’, which you can read on our website. Orwell was quoted in the final edition of the News of the World, which was shut down in response to the phone-hacking scandal. (Nick Davies, who has been leading The Guardian’s investigations into phone-hacking, was longlisted for his Flat Earth News in 2009.) The quote came from Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’, which is on our website, and you can also read The Observer’s Robert McCrum on the paper’s use of Orwell’s quote. Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor wrote about Orwell’s essay and the NotW for The Independent.

From elsewhere

The Wartime Diaries

The next entry will be published on 28th August.

The Wigan Pier Diary

The final entry was published on 25th March. In addition to the blog, we have a Google Map tracking Orwell’s journey, a flickr set of archive images, and our page on The Road to Wigan Pier, with the first chapter and other links. We’ll have some more exciting Orwell diary news soon… 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.