Monday 10 August 2026
Juliet Gardiner – the writer and historian whose book Wartime Britain: 1939-1945 was shortlisted for The Orwell Prize in 2005 – died this June aged 82. Professor Jean Seaton, President and Ambassador-at-Large of The Orwell Foundation, has contributed an article in Gardiner’s memory to The Orwell Foundation website, which can be read in full here.
The engine of everything Juliet did was a generous curiosity. It was not the questioning of a journalist who asks what is broken, although she was fierce on the subjects of injustice and poverty, but rather a search for how the grand sweep of history, culture and politics affects ordinary lives. Any one of those ordinary lives just might have been her own.”