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Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Anna Funder: 'Orwell was sadistic, paranoid and misogynistic'
How does your experience as an international human rights lawyer help you as an author? What skills did you pick up in your previous career and continue to rely on? I was a lawyer briefly and a bad one. I was very young when I stopped. What has stayed with me is the training in trying to identify the very heart of an issue so that you can ask the right questions. I have also retained a sense of what lawyers call natural justice, which means that you have to consider the opposing view, almost with as much energy, to make sure that you are being fair. This approach has been very important to me in all my work. Lawyers are also trained to dig dirt on people, which is what you do very well with your book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life. How was that experience for you? (laughs) Digging dirt on author George Orwell was not my aim but I was very shocked at what I found. Well, I think that he was a repressed homosexual. There is a lot of evidence for that. He co-wrote the novella Animal Farm with his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. It was her idea to write that book, and her voice is very much in it. And it looks like she saved Orwell's life during the Spanish Civil War. I also didn't know that he was so enormously unfaithful to Eileen. Besides all this, he was sort of irresponsible in other ways. He almost had his nieces and nephews killed in a boating accident, which was very preventable. He was a bit reckless with his own life and with others' lives as well. These discoveries about his life were unexpected. Your approach to his life seems like that of an archaeologist or a detective. Please tell us about your research. With the sort of legal mind that I have, I really try to get all the facts right. That's why this book has a huge number of endnotes to tie in everything to fact. That said, I want the reading experience to be seamless. I want people to inhale this book. I want it to be so exciting that you just keep going. Research helps. I went to Spain where Orwell and Eileen lived during the Spanish Civil War. I paid a visit to the trenches in Aragon, and I walked around Barcelona. Orwell was fighting in the war, and Eileen was working for a Marxist political party. I also went to a remote island called Jura off the coast of Scotland and spent some time in the house where Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. I went into the bedroom where he lay as a very ill man recovering from tuberculosis and typed out his book. It was so moving to be there! In addition, I went to some archives in London for primary research. I also read six major biographies of Orwell quite closely. The accounts of his life vary across books. I was keen to examine how his life has been written up and how Eileen has been written out of it. What makes Eileen an attractive personality for you? Well, everybody loved her and I think I know the reason why. One of her friends was a novelist and wrote her into a character in a novel. Eileen had an ability to listen deeply. She made people feel seen and heard. She had the generosity of spirit to really think about something from someone else's point of view. She could sense how they were feeling. If you could plan a girls' day out with Eileen, where would you take her? I live in Sydney, so I would take Eileen for a long walk along the cliff tops and the beach. We'd look across the ocean at the lighthouse and just talk and talk and talk. I would ask her a lot of questions. I want to know how much she loved Orwell, though one can never quantify love, or how much he and his work were a way for her to write before she found the confidence to write on her own. She was the one who took up jobs to support them financially. She worked in the Department of Censorship in the Ministry of Information in London during the Second World War. And later she worked at the Ministry of Food. The ministries that Orwell writes about in Nineteen Eighty-Four were informed by her work. Eileen was fabulous! Was Eileen bitter about Orwell taking credit for her work, or would you call her a doormat? No, Eileen was in no way a doormat. But I don't think that she was bitter either. She was extremely intelligent. Once, she said that Orwell had 'a remarkable political simplicity' whereas she was a very sophisticated political thinker. One of the biographers quoted her as saying that he had 'a remarkable political sympathy'. My research showed me how biographers changed the words because they could not bear their hero, Orwell, to have a wife who was cleverer. I think Eileen was happy that she was improving his work. Of course, she was pleased with Animal Farm. It is really an almost perfect novel. Orwell and Eileen wrote it together. Your book completely changes the way fans look at Orwell's life and work. What are your thoughts on recent allegations of sexual assault against author Neil Gaiman, and how they are changing the way fans approach his work? This issue applies to a lot of male figures throughout history because patriarchy allows men to have a public reputation that is decent, and then do things in private to women and sometimes children. The crimes that they commit are edited out of the story. Shame works to silence women and children who are victims of sexual abuse. We are seeing this with Neil Gaiman now but we have seen this with Woody Allen too. People don't seem to care about it. Things get complicated when you are talking about an artist because artists are often looking at things right out on the edge of what it is to be human. We want works of art to frighten us or to reveal things that we are refusing to see. They go to the edge of what is acceptable. They write out of their flaws at times. Orwell was sadistic, paranoid and misogynistic. You see all these aspects represented in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. People don't seem to mind them. I haven't read Neil Gaiman before and I don't plan to read him now. I hope there is justice for the women involved because terrible things seem to have happened. But my 15-year-old son is reading his book at the moment and I am not telling him about the allegations that have come out. He is 15, and I just want him to have this experience of reading the book without knowing all of that. Personally, what I know about Orwell doesn't bother me. I am happy to read his work. I am not less fond of him. I see him as a much more complex man. The superhero version of Orwell is fictitious, and someone who was so vanilla could never have written those books. You stand on the shoulders of several feminist historians and activists. Please talk about those who have influenced your work. The work of Adrienne Rich, the American poet and essayist, has been very important to me. She was an extraordinary thinker about women and men, and sexuality. Her essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence is among my favourites. She had a beautiful way with language because she was a poet, a fearless person, and unbelievably smart. Resistance is a theme that runs across your books. All That I Am revolves around people who resist the Nazis. In Stasiland, you write about people who resist the secret police in East Germany. Wifedom is about Eileen who resisted patriarchy in her own quiet and dignified way. What makes you return to this theme in every book? This is a very deep psychological question. How much time do you have? (laughs) Firstly, because I'm interested in human courage and human conscience, and those things are to be seen most clearly in extreme situations where they are called into being. We need to think about resistance today because we live in a surveillance society of the kind that the Stasi could only have dreamt of. Despite the risks, people are resisting today. They are questioning, for instance, what Donald Trump is doing. Stories of resistance are appealing to me as a novelist because they are about what it means to be human, to be brave, to take action and be a hero. I grew up in an upper-middle class left-wing household. As a child, I was very aware that a lot of power was being exercised over me. I grew up observing my parents as powerful intellectual giants running the regime, if you want to call it, of the family. That was a deeply formative experience for me. There was a lot of argument around the dinner table. It was ostensibly intellectual but it also had a lot of emotional force. As a writer you are always looking at what's really going on under the surface. My childhood was my training in looking at powerful people, hearing what they were saying and then sensing what was going on at an emotional level. Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Same as It Ever Was
In their upside down, Alice-in-Wonderland version of reality, the left has a point when they cast George Orwell as a prophet of our times. Our world increasingly resembles the soul-crushing landscape of manipulation the English writer limned in the pages of "1984" and "Animal Farm." Powerful forces in government, media, academia, and business have transformed much of the news into propaganda. During the Biden years, for example, the left cast their push for censorship as a commitment to truth and the coercive control of everyday life as the flowering of freedom. Talk about Orwellian. Now that Donald Trump is back in office, they are once again insisting the president and his populist supports on the right are an existential threat to liberty. Blessedly, however, we still live in a relatively open society. Many of us can see through and expose their deceit. Thats why Hans Christian Anderson rivals Orwell as our most useful modern prophet. His tale, "The Emperors New Clothes," captures the daily experience of watching very serious people holding very serious conversations about total nonsense. Its why watching the news makes us channel our inner Elvis - give me a gun so I can shoot that TV. The most recent front-page example is the wall-to-wall coverage of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompsons new book, "Original Sin: President Bidens Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." They report that hundreds of people knew that Biden was not up to running the country, and yet this scheming horde hid this secret from the legacy media. It was only after they lost the election that these conspirators decided to spill the beans. In fact, polls show millions of people knew the score on Biden well before the election. One didnt need special access, just two eyes to see the truth. Yes, it is nice to have the books detail on the consternation about Bidens infirmities, but that just confirms rather than expands our knowledge. Even as it pretends to reveal the truth, "Original Sin" is another exercise in gaslighting, because it tries to make the starting point of the story - the effort to hide Bidens incapacity - its endpoint. The pressing issue, however, is not the cover-up, but the cover-up of the cover-up. Which unelected officials were running the government in Bidens name? How did they do it? How did they justify it? Turning the old Watergate question around: What did the president not know and when did he not know it? And, why did so many of the nations most influential news outlets participate in this charade? How was Bidens health discussed in top newsrooms? Who made the decision to dismiss these consequential concerns? Answering those questions and naming names is the urgent task for media outlets who have already lost the trust of much of the country because of their partisan coverage. Instead of experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment, however, the legacy media is likely to use its coverage of the book to bury the Biden years under the claim that the key questions have now been asked and answered. It will use the "lessons" it learned as a reason to pound Trump even harder, including questioning his mental fitness. If Democrats and their media stenographers have learned anything, it is that they will almost certainly get away with it. The Biden cover-up is part of a decades-long pattern in which they have stridently misled the American people - against all evidence - about the biggest issues of the day. The short list includes advancing the clearly bogus claims that Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election; attacking those who made the obvious connection between the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology; delegitimizing reports about the material on Hunter Bidens laptop detailing the Biden familys influence-peddling schemes; and the truly Orwellian effort to disparage honest challenges of official narratives as "misinformation" and "disinformation." Going back nearly two decades, there was the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, in which local and national media outlets echoed a local Democrat district attorneys assertion that a bunch of rich preppies had raped a poor black stripper. There was never any real evidence for this heinous crime, apart from the troubled womans claims. Yet the young men were convicted in the press simply because of their alleged privilege. A few years after this shameful episode, the media were back it, advancing false narratives about the deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014 to allege a war on blacks - setting the stage for the racist convulsions of the Black Lives Matters movement and DEI programs. None of these missteps resulted in soul-searching - though a few did result in Pulitzer Prizes. The next few years promise more of the same: the Orwellian twisting of facts that will bombard us with dangerous lies. As the aptly named group "Talking Heads" once sang: Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Its enough to make you go full Elvis. J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X @jpederzane.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Today's NYT Strands Hints (and Answer) for Tuesday, May 27, 2025
If you're looking for hints and answers for Strands for Tuesday, May 27, 2025, read on—I'll share some clues and tips, and finally the solution to the puzzle with the theme 'A strange new world.' For an easy way to come back to our Strands hints every day, bookmark this page. You can also find our past hints there as well, in case you want to know what you missed in a previous puzzle. Below, I'll give you some oblique hints at today's Strands answers. And farther down the page, I'll reveal the spangram and the answers. Scroll slowly and take just the hints you need! Hint for the spangram in today's Strands puzzle A genre of literature, meant to act as a cautionary tale, in which some aspect of society has gone severely awry. Hint for the theme words in today's Strands puzzle Two-word book titles, but each word is a separate entry for today's puzzle. BEWARE: Spoilers follow for today's Strands puzzle! We're about to give away the answers to today's Strands puzzle. Today's spangram is DYSTOPIANNOVEL. The theme words today are: HUNGER, GAMES, HANDMAIDS, TALE, ANIMAL, FARM. Here's what the board looks like when the puzzle is solved: How I solved today's Strands The puzzle theme makes me think of space travel and exploration. Let's see what we can find. I see STOP and STING, but those aren't theme words. Oh, but GAMES is. 🔵 Hmm. I see the words DYSTOPIA and DYSTOPIAN down the left edge, but they're not theme words—certainly part of the spangram, then. Maybe GAMES is a reference to The Hunger Games? There it is! DYSTOPIANNOVEL. 🟡 HANDMAIDS (As in The Handmaid's Tale) starts in the upper right and goes down, then across the top of the spangram. 🔵 FARM (Animal Farm) is in the bottom right. 🔵 TALE is in the bottom center—oh, so it's both words from the novel titles. 🔵 HUNGER is to the left of HANDMAIDS. 🔵 Lastly, ANIMAL. 🔵 How to play Strands You can find the Strands game on the New York Times website and in the NYT Games app. When you start playing, you'll see a game board with an assortment of letters, flanked by a clue that gives a hint at the board's theme—this will be a phrase, like 'Better with age.' Your job is to find the hidden words within the board that reflect the puzzle's theme. The most important word to find is the 'spangram,' a word that more explicitly states the puzzle's theme. (For example, the spangram for the puzzle with the theme "Better with age" is FERMENTED, which describes products that are, you guessed it, better with age.) The spangram will span the entire game board, either from left to right or top to bottom (hence the name). When you find the spangram, it will be highlighted in yellow. Solving the spangram usually makes the rest of the puzzle much easier to complete. In Strands, words can travel any direction (up, down, left, right, and diagonal), and you will only use each letter once. There is only one correct solution. When you correctly identify one of the puzzle's words (for example, KOMBUCHA, MISO, or KIMCHI), it will be highlighted in blue. If you are struggling to solve the puzzle, you can submit any non-theme words you see (as long as they are four letters or more) to receive credit toward a single hint. If you submit three non-theme words, the 'Hint' button will be clickable; if you click it, all of the letters in one of the theme words will be highlighted for you. You will still have to link these highlighted letters in the right order to form one of the theme words. If there is already a hint on the board and you use another hint before solving for that word, that word's letter order will be revealed. Unlike Connections and Wordle, you cannot fail Strands. When you submit guesses, you will either correctly identify an answer, receive credit toward a hint, or the text will shake back and forth, indicating that the word you submitted is too short or not valid. You can't run out of guesses, and there is no time limit. You win when you've correctly used all the letters on the board, meaning that you have identified the spangram and all of the theme words. Like other NYT games, upon solving the puzzle, you will see a shareable card that indicates how you performed that day: blue dots 🔵 indicate theme words you found, the yellow dot 🟡 indicates when you found the spangram, and a lightbulb 💡 indicates words that you received a hint for.
Time of India
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
NYT Strands Hints and Answers for May 27: Full Word List, Theme, and Spangram from Dystopian Novel Puzzle
NYT Strands Hints and Answers for May 27 bring you into a world of famous dystopian novels, where each hidden word is linked to iconic book titles. From Animal Farm to The Handmaid's Tale, today's puzzle theme, 'A Strange New World,' makes you think deeper while testing your word-hunting skills. With the spangram "Dystopian Novel" running across the grid, solving today's game gets easier if you know your books. Whether you're stuck on a clue or just curious about the answers, this simple guide will help you breeze through the puzzle. All answers, hints, and book titles are right here. Get all the NYT Strands hints and answers for May 27 including today's spangram, full word list, and theme explained. Explore how dystopian novels shaped the puzzle and find quick help to solve today's game with ease Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads What is the NYT Strands puzzle and why is it different? What is the NYT Strands theme for May 27? Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads What is the spangram for NYT Strands on May 27? Orientation: Horizontal Which words do you need to find in today's puzzle? Animal – From Animal Farm by George Orwell Hunger – From The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins Handmaids – From The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood Games – Also tied to The Hunger Games Tale – A nod to The Handmaid's Tale Farm – Refers to Animal Farm Why is today's NYT Strands puzzle so interesting? Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads How can players improve their Strands game strategy? Start with the Spangram – It's always the longest word or phrase and gives you a sense of direction. Look for letter patterns – Words like "Farm" or "Games" tend to have common letter groupings. Change directions freely – Words don't move in a straight line. Diagonals and zig-zags are part of the fun. Use the theme – Today's clue, A Strange New World, was a big hint. Thinking of dystopian stories made all the answers easier to guess. NYT Strands for May 27 FAQs: If you're here, you're likely playing the NYT Strands game and stuck on the May 27 puzzle. You're not alone. Every letter counts, and every word is twisted into a path that doesn't follow the usual straight line. With today's tricky theme, "A Strange New World," even seasoned players hit a wall. No worries — we've gathered every clue, nudge, and outright answer so you can crack it all, from the hidden words to the special NYT Strands puzzle is a daily word-search-style game from The New York Times, but it's not your average search. The twist? Words can zig-zag, shift directions, and take diagonal turns. Every letter in the grid is part of a word — no fillers. The biggest challenge is spotting the spangram, a word or phrase that touches both ends of the grid, summing up the theme of the on May 27, the spangram and the theme take you into the realm of fiction — quite literally.A Strange New WorldAccording to The New York Times, today's theme points to "reading-related" terms. It's all about dystopian fiction — those stories set in dark, twisted worlds that challenge the very idea of freedom, control, and if you're thinking "books," you're warm — but if you're thinking "dystopian novels," you're right on NOVELThe term Dystopian Novel stretches across the grid from left to right. It's the key to understanding the rest of the answers — all are linked to famous dystopian is your anchor. Spotting this word opens the door to the remaining the full NYT Strands word list for May 27:Each of these words links directly to a bestselling or classic dystopian novel, tying back to the puzzle brings together some of the most powerful titles in modern and classic literature. From Orwell's Animal Farm to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the answers touch on major cultural conversations. These books often explore topics like surveillance, authoritarian regimes, loss of identity, and rebellion — topics still relevant titles in this puzzle are studied in classrooms and debated in book clubs, which makes today's theme not just fun, but you're new to NYT Strands, keep these tips in mind:Today's NYT Strands puzzle took us on a literary journey through the worlds of dystopian novels, challenging readers to recall famous titles and characters. Whether it was spotting "Hunger" from The Hunger Games or finding "Handmaids" from The Handmaid's Tale, each word was a window into a darker fictional world — and a satisfying answer for those who pieced it all more help with your daily NYT puzzles like Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee? Stay tuned. We break them down every morning so you can keep your streak going spangram is "Dystopian Novel."Animal Farm, The Hunger Games, and The Handmaid's Tale.
The Citizen
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
‘Roger Waters: The Wall' is an epic watch of powerful music
'Roger Waters: The Wall' sees the rock star explore his emotional nostalgia. Music can be powerful. Incredibly powerful. It can agitate for social or political change, lament or celebrate love and speak for the collective. Other music speaks directly to the soul, the afraid in each of us, the trauma and the hurt. It can teach us lessons, inject new ideas, inspire and decelerate thoughts or speed up personal metamorphosis. Such is the power of Pink Floyd's music. And it's been around 45 years since the band released The Wall, toured the album and produced the first cinematic incarnation of the music's narrative. Yet, it's as relevant today and inwardly touching as it was on the first day of release. And Apple TV's now put the Roger Waters 2014 epic live concert documentary on its menu. It is a must-watch, a must-collect. But it makes you wish that you were in the audience, then. The film is long. It stretches over two hours with beautifully shot cinematic scenes of Waters on another kind of journey. While the music and the Alan Parker-directed 1982 film tells of the character's progressive journey as a reluctant rock star and the walls – demons he must manage inside – the clips spaced between the live performance tell a contra-narrative. Waters explores his emotional nostalgia, in many ways quietly faces his own demons and traces the actual moments and people in his family, like his dad and grandfather, who lie at the base of the original music. Biographical account of Waters' life Roger Waters: The Wall, after all, is a biographic recount of Waters' life, his struggle with the death of his dad in the Second World War, and being bullied at school. It's a treatise to the mistrust of the State at a grand scale. The film is Nietzsche's existentialism coupled with Orwell's Animal Farm, along with a measure of emotional turbulence that can resonate with both the dark and lighter side of our inner selves. Roger Waters: The Wall is in forward and reverse motion at the same time. And despite the long running time and numb-bum risk, it's an epic watch. The show is a far cry from the Dome performance in South Africa during the same tour. Here, Waters was close to unplugged and intimate. On stage in the film, he conducts a larger-than-life audiovisual spectacular that showcases his showmanship. Also Read: U2's 'How to Reassemble an Atomic Bomb' is a satisfying throwback If you are a Pink Floyd fan and followed the angry split between Waters and the rest of the band – the copyright punch-ups and mutual dislike between the parties – this is the moment to forget about it and just immerse yourself in the music. Drummer Nick Mason reunites with Waters in the film and, at the end, the pair answer questions from fans around the world. The two also spend some time talking and tracing nostalgia at earlier intervals. Last year David Gilmour joined Waters in celebrating the 45th anniversary of the album. Best-selling double album of all time The Wall remains the best-selling double album of all time with 30 million copies sold and ranks just behind the band's Dark Side of The Moon. The latter musical sortie holds the collective highest sales tally at 45 million copies. Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 – the anthem off The Wall – has been streamed well over a billion times. The band's progressive rock is not for everyone, and is for everyone at the same time. Because the truths in the lyrics are not unlike our own prayers for emotional asylum. Roger Waters: The Wall brings it all full circle. Of course, there are naysayers and when the film was first released it suffered some pretty nasty reviews from critics who relegated the entire effort to an ego trip. But when you watch the work and experience the music, it's easy to see the codswallop and ignorance of negative impressions. To fully understand the show, audiences new to Pink Floyd or anyone who has not seen Bob Geldof as Pink in the original film, must watch it. It is a cinematic masterpiece of its time and a sensory ride unlike any other. From the Nazi references to the evils of conformity, war and inner conflict, The Wall was an explainer film like no other. Roger Waters: The Wall sees it coming full circle. Also Read: Nasreen's the thinking Swiftie's kind of music
