The Literature Network - Books: Southwold's black sheep George Orwell's image as an outsider may have been rooted in a low sense of self-worth, finds Bill Saunders

Books: Southwold's black sheep George Orwell's image as an outsider may have been rooted in a low sense of self-worth, finds Bill Saunders

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20001112
Author:Bill Saunders

"I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday." Actually, by the time this sentence was published, in The Road To Wigan Pier, its author was a second-lieutenant in an anarchist militia on the Aragon Front. Enlisted under his real name, Eric Blair, and giving his occupation as grocer, Orwell managed to retain his fine eye for the sordid even while under enemy fire. "Every soldier since Thermopylae has had lice crawling over his balls," he recalled in Homage To Catalonia, regarded by the Spanish as the ...

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Books: Southwold's black sheep George Orwell's image as an outsider may have been rooted in a low sense of self-worth, finds Bill Saunders

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