Friday 02 September 2011
The British author P. G. Wodehouse, best known for his Jeeves and Wooster stories, was in the news recently with the release of his MI5 files. A contemporary of Orwell’s, Wodehouse was interned by the Nazis in 1941 and controversially broadcast from Nazi Germany.
We’re very pleased to be able to bring you Orwell’s essay on the matter, ‘In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse’, on our website.
We’re very grateful to the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books for letting us publish it on our website, along with many other Orwell works, which you can read in our ‘By Orwell’ section.
And if you’re a Wodehouse fan, BBC2 are showing a programme tonight at 9pm, Wogan on Wodehouse.
Orwell Prize at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival
- Saturday 15th October, 10am: ’Victorian Values’ with Shiv Malik and Owen Jones
- Sunday 16th October, 6pm: ‘The Political Network’ with Graeme Archer and Oliver Kamm
From the archive
Pinch, punch, first of the month – and a chance to return to some Orwell essays first published in September. For now, we have ‘Shooting an Elephant’, about Orwell’s time in Burma, from 1936; and ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, on seaside postcard humour, from 1941.
Lady Bingham, widow of this year’s Book Prize winner, Tom Bingham, wrote to us this week to say: ‘You will be delighted to know that a friend had her copy of The Rule of Law confiscated by Syrian customs officials’. You can read the first chapter on our website.
From elsewhere
- The Independent on Sunday writes about our new hop-picking diary blog
- The FT’s Simon Kuper, inspired by Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’, writes about the words and phrases he’d like to see banned
- A reader writes, ‘Do you have any podcasts of Orwell’s voice?’ We answer with this D. J. Taylor essay…
- …and you can also read the script of one of his Voice programmes for BBC radio
- Orwell’s old pub landlady speaks to BBC Radio 4 (22.20 in) about her famous customer and his tankard. Orwell gives his take on the perfect pub in ‘The Moon Under Water’
- Homage to Catalonia makes TIME’s top 100 non-fiction books
- One of India’s biggest English-language newspapers, The Hindu, republished Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’ as part of its campaign against capital punishment
- Football transfer deadline day in the UK makes it a good time to revisit Orwell’s ‘A Sporting Spirit’, which includes a link to some newsreel of a football match he mentions
- Christopher de Bellaigue’s Rebel Land – shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2010 – makes The Guardian’s top 10 books on Turkey
- Francis Spufford, longlisted for this year’s Book Prize, writes about Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate – Orwell editor Peter Davison compares Grossman and Orwell in this video from the 2010 Cheltenham Festival
- Oliver Bullough, shortlisted for Let Our Fame Be Great, joins twitter – read the first chapter on our website
The Wartime Diaries
Over the last week, entries were published on 28th August.
The next entry will be published on 14th March.
The Hop-Picking Diaries
Over the last week, entries were published on 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th August.
The next entry will be published on 18th September.
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.