Latest news with #Orwell
Hindustan Times
4 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.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Gary Lineker shows Palestine support just hours after leaving BBC
Gary Lineker embraced his first day of post-BBC freedom by defiantly sharing a poem of support for Palestine which includes a George Orwell quotation. Lineker shared a verse by Nikita Gill, who had been expressing heartbreak for paediatrician Alaa al Najjar after her nine children were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Just hours after leaving the Match of the Day studios for the last time, Lineker shared Gill's poem on his Instagram story between tributes after his BBC goodbye. The verse shared by Lineker said: 'A mother on duty caring for her patients receives the remains of nine of her children. We are told to ignore this. 'A child who can barely walk struggles to find safety through flames in the aftermath of a bomb, unable to breathe. We are told to ignore this.' It then ends with a quote from Orwell which says: 'The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.' The verse ends with: 'We must refuse to abdicate our duty to each other and see the truth for what is before us.' Lineker had been left wiping away tears on Sunday night after a star-studded montage paid tribute to his 26 years as Match of the Day's anchor. He explained on his Rest is Football podcast, however, that it was the sight of his sons talking about him on the video that had left him weeping. 'Thankfully, that wasn't the last clip, because I'd gone at that point,' he explained. 'I needed time to to get myself together, to try and get through the the end of the show.' Lineker will lose out on an estimated £800,000 after being forced to leave without a pay-off. Sources close to the corporation say the decision to drop him was made primarily by BBC chiefs who had run out of patience with his outspoken political views. During his emotional goodbye on Sunday, Lineker said the show is now 'in the best of hands' as Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates and Mark Chapman replace him next season. Pep Guardiola, Virgil Van Dyke, Paul Gascoigne, Peter Shilton and Alan Hansen joined the likes of Alan Shearer and Micah Richards on a special montage celebrating his career on the show. Lineker, who was handed a cap and a golden boot as goodbye gifts, composed himself to make a typically wry summary of his stint as the BBC's top sports anchor. 'Rather like my football career, everyone else did all the hard work, and I got the plaudits,' he said as he signed off. He added: 'It's been an absolute privilege to have hosted Match of the Day for a quarter of a century. It's been utterly joyous. I'd like to wish Gabby, Mark and Kelly all the very best when they sit in this chair. The programme is in the best of hands.' Gary Lineker says goodbye to #MOTD after 25 years. — Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) May 25, 2025 Claudio Ranieri, Guy Mowbray, Alan Smith and Ian Wright also appeared on a special video paying tribute to Lineker's career. Opening credits had also been adapted with some of Lineker's most famous goal-scoring moments. Lineker had opened his last show with a wry remark about the furore surrounding him in recent weeks. 'It wasn't meant to end this way,' he said, before adding 'but with the title race over and the relegation places confirmed, the Champions League was all we had left to talk about.' Lineker's final show had remained a significant point of contention behind the scenes in recent days but the programme has a history of paying tribute to departing stars. There were emotional send-offs for Alan Hansen while Ian Wright was presented with a cap during his final appearance last year. For Lineker, however, tribute planning was not straightforward. A host of Jewish members of BBC staff and television executives elsewhere have spoken of their anger that he was granted a chance to say goodbye after sharing a social-media post featuring anti-Semitic imagery. Leo Pearlman, chief executive at Fulwell Entertainment, and Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television, have said Lineker does not deserve a 'swansong'. The latest controversy was set in motion a fortnight ago when the Match of the Day presenter used Instagram to promote a pro-Palestinian video featuring a rat emoji – an icon used by the Nazis as a slur against Jewish people. Lineker apologised and removed the video but calls to remove him from the BBC grew louder when Telegraph Sport published an explosive interview with Lineker in which he went further than ever in his comments about Israel and also criticised his boss at the BBC. It was confirmed at noon last Monday that this Sunday's Match of the Day would be Lineker's last BBC outing. Lineker, who has hosted Match of the Day since 1999, issued an unreserved apology for the 'hurt and upset caused' by the video, stating it was a 'genuine mistake'.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5' Review: Raoul's Peck's Vital Film Shows How We're Living In A ‘1984'-Style Dystopia
When I was growing up, the lessons of 1984 – the dystopian novel by George Orwell – were all thought to pertain to the Soviet Union. Big Brother was Josef Stalin – controlling the thoughts of his people, punishing dissenters. If that had been correct, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and freeing of its similarly totalitarian satellite regimes would have rendered the novel irrelevant to our present times. 1984 would have been a mere artifact reflecting outdated concerns of an earlier era marked by sinister eradication of personal liberties. Turns out that's not the case. More from Deadline 'My Father's Shadow' Review: First Nigerian Film Selected For Competition Is A Moving Universal Story Of Fathers And Sons - Cannes Film Festival Nicole Kidman Talks Viral 'Babygirl' TikToks & Gives Mascha Schilinski's 'Sound Of Falling' A Shoutout During Cannes Talk Andrew Garfield & Focus Features Nearing Deals To Join Paul Greengrass Peasant Revolt Movie 'The Rage': Cannes Market Raoul Peck's vital documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, which premiered tonight at the Cannes Film Festival, makes it startlingly clear the degree to which we are living in Orwellian times. The parallels between the nightmare of 1984 – where Big Brother dictates every facet of life – and Trump's America have not been properly acknowledged. This film does that. Trump is unleashing thought police – e.g. the order directing the Smithsonian Institution to 'remove improper ideology' from national museums – to such a degree that it seems ripped from the pages of Orwell's novel. A nation that used to be enshrine freedom of speech in its Bill of Rights is seeing those precious liberties ground under the totalitarian boot. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 goes well beyond just the darkening reality in America. Putin, uttering the cruel Newspeak of 'special military operation' before unleashing full-scale warfare on Ukrainian civilians, makes an appearance here, as does the military leader of Myanmar, who blithely dismisses any concern for the persecuted Rohingya minority who have been driven into Bangladesh. Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, Israeli P.M. Banjamin Netanyahu, France's Marine Le Pen, Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán (a darling of the American right), Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, the grinning Nigel Farrage, head of the UK. Reform Party – all the actual and would-be autocrats take a bow to remind us that Orwell speaks to our times as much as he did to an earlier era. The documentary serves partly as biography of Orwell, who was born Eric Arthur Blair in what is now the state of Bihar in India. Peck, who earned an Academy Award nomination for an equally incisive film – I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin – shows a photograph of Orwell as a baby in the arms of an Indian nanny. Most people of his background would never have questioned their privilege, or 'right to rule,' but Peck explores how Orwell came to realize that the imperialistic ideology that was his birthright could not pass the test of moral scrutiny. He came to that realization after serving in the British Imperial Service in Burma (present-day Myanmar), where people like him in uniform abused ordinary Burmese without thinking twice. Peck offers insight into Orwell's political evolution by drawing on letters, manuscripts and other unpublished materials, with actor Damian Lewis providing the author's voice. Orwell's letters also reveal the heroic physical exertion he put in to finish 1984 as his health deteriorated from tuberculosis. 1984 was published in 1949. By January of 1950, Orwell was dead, at the age of just 46. The filmmaker uses an animation of tubercular bacteria periodically in the film to suggest Orwell's advancing illness. But that visual motif might just as well signify the unhealthy state of democracies around the world, where autocrats have infected the bloodstream of the body politic with despicable poisons as they assert every greater control over the minds and thoughts of their subjects. Trump's attempt to bring universities to heel, to punish enemies (see Friday's story about a nascent investigation into former FBI director James Comey for posting a photo on social media that Trump crowd didn't like), to deport people without due process of law, to cow the courts by encouraging his supporters to attack jurists who rule against his executive orders, to weaponize the Justice Department – the onslaught seems to have knocked the Trump opposition on its heels, left it struggling to come up with a coherent response to the Trump wrecking ball. In this film, we have the full-throated retort that's called for. Trump, incredibly, has essentially managed to rewrite January 6 to serve his own narrative. But Peck shows the true violence of the day, the noose erected on the capitol grounds meant for the neck of Trump's Vice President, Mike Pence. It's all the more chilling, then, to hear in the film the president's new characterization of that day: 'These were very peaceful people,' he says in a quote seen in the documentary. 'The love in the air, I've never seen anything like it.' Spoken like Big Brother. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 is an urgent, indispensable film for our times. Title: Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 Festival: Cannes (Cannes Premieres section) Distributor: Neon Director: Raoul Peck Running time: 119 minutes Best of Deadline 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Winners Through The Years
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
The BBC's problems go far beyond Gary Lineker
As one might expect from a 103-year-old organisation, the BBC has a very high opinion of itself. Outside Broadcasting House stands a statue of George Orwell. Inscribed next to it is a quotation by him: 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' A noble sentiment, and a more flattering testament to the corporation than Orwell's description of it after working there during the second world war: 'Something halfway between a girl's school and a lunatic asylum.' In his growing outspokenness, the football pundit Gary Lineker might have thought that he was channelling Orwell. Even before he was accused of sharing anti-Semitic emojis on Instagram, his handsome salary and his unwillingness to trim his social media output to fit his employer's impartiality rules were making his role as Match of the Day presenter untenable. Yet the Lineker of today curiously embodies Auntie better than anyone else: smug, expensive, out of touch. Our national broadcaster resembles the monasteries of Tudor England on the eve of their dissolution. Once a focal point for enlightenment, the BBC now houses a privileged and costly class that has forgotten its duty to the public. Mired in scandal, financially unviable and marooned in a changing world, the corporation is ripe for reformation. The BBC was created in 1922 in response to the proliferation of radio. In the United States this had led to the swift creation of hundreds of stations. Frightened by this audio anarchy, Britain's six leading radio firms established a single, state-approved broadcaster.
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Raoul Peck's Brilliant Orwell: 2+2=5 Is the Boldest Documentary Anyone Could Make Right Now
R aoul Peck is one of our most valuable documentary filmmakers. Instead of just presenting us with information, he shows us ways of seeing, inspiring us to look for patterns and connections we might not have seen otherwise. That's the principle at work in his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. You can know George Orwell's work backward and forward and still find something new in Peck's film; or you can be an Orwell neophyte and understand why, 75 years after his death, his ideas and preoccupations feel more modern than ever. At certain points in the 20th century, dystopian novels like Animal Farm and 1984 may have seemed unnecessarily alarmist, cautionary tales but not necessarily foregone conclusions about our future. In 2025, they read like nonfiction. In these books, and in the witty, joyously precise essays he wrote during his lifetime, Orwell worried in advance about the lives we're living today. Orwell: 2+2=5 makes the case for why we should be worrying, too. Peck's 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, a kind of imagined reconstruction of the ambitious historical work James Baldwin was just starting to write when he died, in 1987, is one of the finest documentaries of this century so far, a mini-history of Black racial identity in America from the mid- to late 20th century. With Orwell: 2+2=5, Peck returns to a similar idea: sometimes a writer's final work—the last thing they leave behind, even if they'd hoped to accomplish more—can become an unwittingly definitive statement. Orwell: 2+2=5 begins with the beginning of an end: in 1946, the writer born with the name Eric Arthur Blair retreated to the unruly and beautiful Scottish island of Jura, where he would write what would become his final completed book. 1984 is the story of a dutiful average citizen in a futuristic society, Winston Smith, who goes about the tasks of his job (rewriting history according to the whims of his country's totalitarian government) even as he harbors secret dreams of rebellion. That makes him, in just one of the many unnervingly prescient terms Orwell coined for the book, a 'thought-criminal,' which leads to his capture and brutal re-education. The novel was published in 1949, the year before Orwell would succumb to tuberculosis, which he'd contracted as he was writing the book. Orwell: 2+2=5 —its title derived from a mathematical falsehood that wasn't invented by Orwell, but which he used as an example of how humans can be programmed to believe that a lie is the truth—both tells the story of Orwell's last years and makes the case for his work as a weapon against the malicious forces seeking to undermine our autonomy as thinking human beings. Intricate and multi-layered, it covers a lot of territory in a runtime of roughly two hours; you might feel yourself racing to keep up with it. But that's what makes Peck's work in general, and this documentary in particular, so exhilarating. To say Orwell's language feels modern isn't exactly right—few writers of today are as clear or defiantly direct—but his ideas hit as if he'd formulated them only yesterday. Excerpts from his books and essays—read by Damien Lewis—float over news clips showing streets reduced to rubble after 2003's Battle of Basra in Iraq, or capturing the anguish of man grieving over a child's body in 2023 Gaza. Just as we're processing a characteristically observant Orwell sentence like 'To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country,' a sly clip of George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq flashes before us. Peck is a master at matching words with images. His thinking is sophisticated, but never abstract. He covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time, outlining the biographical details of Orwell's life, including the time he spent as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the early 1920s, an experience that drastically shaped his later political beliefs. (He came to loathe himself for having been 'part of the actual machinery of despotism.') There are clips from movies and television, too, and not just the two film adaptations of 1984 (the first being Michael Anderson's 1956 version, followed by Michael Radford's in 1984). We get snippets of David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist and Sydney Pollack's 1985 Out of Africa: Peck helps us understand, in dots and dashes, the world Orwell came from; amazingly, he makes the complexities of class politics in Great Britain almost easy to understand. But most of all, Peck is blazingly forthright in his championing of Orwell as a man from the past who may just hold the key to the world's future. You might think that's too tall an order for any human—but that's only if you haven't read Orwell. He was clever and fun, as well as serious-minded—exactly the opposite of dull and instructive. And he understood better than any other 20th century English-speaking writer how language could be used to confuse and corrupt. In the pages of 1984 he served up slogans so fiendishly distinctive that you'd have to be brain-dead to miss the warnings wrapped up in them. Peck shares some of them with us here: 'Freedom is slavery.' 'War is peace.' These jangly contradictions, presented as truths, are designed to rattle and rewire our brains; just think how easily a corrupt authoritarian leader could put them to use, and how readily a not-thinking public could fall right in line. Peck doesn't spell that out for us—he doesn't have to. Orwell: 2+2=5 feels like the boldest documentary anyone could make right now. Another slogan from 1984: 'Ignorance is strength.' If you don't feel that one in your gut right now, you're sleepwalking through life.
