Reading some Effing Orwell in the Empire

Tribune's one-time literary editor has become a meme and a cliché, but he remains one of the Left's most ethically complex writers, and nowhere more so than in his depictions of the British Empire.

George Orwell has become a meme. The exhortation to ‘read some bloody Orwell’, both ironic and not, can be found all over Twitter. It has become impossible to state that something reminds you of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four without it sounding silly, not least because the political right has seized upon them as simple […]

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