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24 unusual facts about George Orwell


11020 Orwell

George Orwell is the pseudonym of British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), forever associated with the year of discovery, 1984, due to the enduring popularity of his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

24-hour analog dial

George Orwell uses the 12-hour and 24-hour dials to symbolize the old and new worlds in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Barnsley Town Hall

George Orwell in his book The Road to Wigan Pier was highly critical of this expenditure and claimed that the council should have spent the money on improving the housing and living conditions of the local miners.

Beast fable

A more recent example, in English literature, was George Orwell's allegorical novel Animal Farm, in which various political ideologies were personified as animals, such as the Stalinist Napoleon Pig, and the numerous "sheep" that followed his directions without question.

Campus Confidential

The film is a modern-day interpretation of Animal Farm by George Orwell, but with a different ending, as referenced in one of the final scenes of the movie.

Captain Britain Corps

The Corps, not only consists of alternative versions of Brian Braddock from throughout the multiverse, but also characters representing a vast array of different worlds, such as Hauptmann Englande, a member representing a world where Nazis won World War II and Captain Airstrip-One from a world based on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, while some even vary in species, like an animal version and even more exotic forms.

Cigar Dave

The "Pleasure Police" and "Big Pleasure" are plays on George Orwell's "Thought Police" and "Big Brother" themes from the novel 1984, where governments and corporations combine mass surveillance assets to oversee all aspects of an individual's professional and personal life.

False documentation

In George Orwell's novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth has an entire department devoted to altering past editions of newspapers in the belief that changing documentation will change the public's perception of history.

Fredric Warburg

Fredric John Warburg (27 November 1898 – 25 May 1981) was an English publisher best known for his association with the British author George Orwell.

From the Age of Doublethink

The album title and many of the songs' lyrics feature references to the George Orwell book Nineteen Eighty Four.

J. D. Casswell

The case prompted George Orwell to write an essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’.

Jakob Arjouni

One can easily relate Chez Max with the scenes in George Orwell's novel 1984.

John Habberton

Popularity dwindled a bit after WW-II (although George Orwell mentions it very favourably in his 1946 essay on early American literature, "Riding Down from Bangor"), but started rising again in the 1980s.

Nancy Gustafson

In 2005 in London, she appeared in the world premiere of the opera 1984, based upon the famous novel by George Orwell.

No Bird Sing

Rapper and pianist Joe Horton (stage name Eric Blair, after George Orwell) and guitarist Robert Mulrennan were members of the four-piece band Hyder Ali with Kahlil Brewington and Edwin Scherer.

Onofrio Catacchio

With scripts by Andrea Balzola, he created Freaks’ Farm, a spoof adapted from George Orwell’s novel of a similar title.

Passive voice

Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice.

Philip E. Agre

Influential works preceding this essay include George Orwell's 1984, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Constituents of a Theory of the Media, and Michel Foucault's works surrounding the concept of panopticism.

Small Fry Club

Long before this term connoted something from George Orwell, "Big Brother" referred to being a mentor—did much more than read bed-time stories.

Social chauvinism

It is this concept which lies behind the first motto of the tripartite series of George Orwell in his novel which was published in 1949, titled Nineteen Eighty-Four: War is Peace.

T. C. Worsley

His The End of the Old School Tie (1941) was published as part of the Searchlight Books series edited by Tosco Fyvel and George Orwell.

United States v. Kincade

The plurality rejects the dissent's argument that this sets into motion an Orwellian 1984 scenario where everyone could potentially be required to submit to a DNA test.

Victory Square

Victory Square - the name given to Trafalgar Square in London by the totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four"

Wateringbury railway station

The station is mentioned in 'Hop Picking Diary' by George Orwell.


Calliopean Society

For many decades, the Calliopean Society had no physical location, listing itself as located at "1985 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520." Its 1985 box number had been chosen to refer to the inevitable victory of the West over the collectivist totalitarianism described in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Crass Records

The catalogue numbers of Crass Records releases were intended to represent a countdown to the year 1984 (e.g., 521984 meaning "five years until 1984"), both the year that Crass stated that they would split up, and a date charged with significance in the anti-authoritarian calendar due to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Cupping therapy

There is a description of cupping in George Orwell's essay "How the Poor Die", where he was surprised to find it practised in a Paris hospital.

Czech science fiction and fantasy

However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a mainstream literary figure who used science-fiction motifs.

David Lomon

Amongst the British members of the International Brigade that Lomon fought alongside were the trade union leader Jack Jones and writers George Orwell and Laurie Lee.

Emily Blandish

They both travelled forwards in time to an alternative 1984 (based on the novel by George Orwell), where they spent time trying to work out how to get back to their own time — which they ultimately did, whilst also ensuring that the future they had witnessed never came about.

Evelyn Anderson

: the Story of the German Working Class Movement, which George Orwell’s wife Eileen helped edit and Orwell reviewed in the Manchester Evening News.

Goose step

During WWII, it was condemned in George Orwell's essay The Lion and the Unicorn, and proved an easy target for parody in many editorial cartoons and Hollywood movies.

Hans Bemmann

The idea of manipulation by systematic use of language is also present in George Orwell's dystopia 1984.

Harrow History Prize

Notable winners, both from St Cyprian's, included Dyneley Hussey (1905) and Cyril Connolly (1916), with his colleague Eric Blair (George Orwell) in second place.

Henry Longhurst

In his memoirs, My Life and Soft Times, (1971), he defended St Cyprians the school he had arrived at in 1915, from critics like Gavin Maxwell, and George Orwell who had attacked it in his polemic Such, Such Were the Joys.

Honoré Lechasseur

They both travelled forwards in time to an alternative 1984 (based on the novel by George Orwell), where they spent time trying to work out how to get back to their own time – which they ultimately did, whilst also ensuring that the future they had witnessed never came about.

Ipso facto

Aside from its technical uses, it occurs frequently in literature, particularly in scholarly addenda: e.g., "Faustus had signed his life away, and was, ipso facto, incapable of repentance" (re: Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus) or "These prejudices are rooted in the idea that every tramp ipso facto is a blackguard" (re: George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London).

Jaime Semprun

Jaime Semprun gave a lot of his time, along with Anne Krief (his partner) and Michel Pétris, to the translation and publication of the writings of George Orwell unpublished in France at the time for the éditions Ivrea coedited with the éditions de l'Encyclopédie des Nuisances, a work he started, according to Christophe Bourseiller, « under the auspices » of Guy Debord and Gérard Lebovici.

Janusz Krupski

The first work printed on the machine was George Orwell's Animal Farm, also unavailable in communist Poland, although the quality of the material was so low due to the inexperience of Krupski and others that the copies had to be discarded.

Leevi Lehto

His translations, some forty books in total, range from mystery writing to philosophy, sociology, and poetry, including work by Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, George Orwell, Stephen King, Ian McEwan, Josef Skvorecky, Walter Benjamin, John Keats, John Ashbery, Mickey Spillane and Charles Bernstein.

Orwell comma

It is so named because the temperament eliminating this comma, Orwell temperament, has an optimal generator very close to 19 steps out of 84-equal temperament; this pattern of 19/84 steps is similar to the title of Orwell's novel 1984.

Peter Goodall

In the 1980s Goodall broadcast a series of Weekend University programs on radio station, 2SER, detailing work of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

Philip Bounds

His book on George Orwell advances the controversial argument that Orwell's literary and cultural criticism was deeply influenced by the work of British communists.

Rolf Dudley-Williams

During the 1954 controversy over Rudolph Cartier's television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Williams attacked "the tendency, evident in recent British Broadcasting Corporation television programmes, notably on Sunday evenings, to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes".

Ronald Frank Thiemann

He worked on a book-length project entitled Prisoners of Conscience: Public Intellectuals in a Time of Crisis, which examines the courageous stance of four public figures—Anna Akhmatova, Albert Camus, Langston Hughes, and George Orwell—during the tumultuous period of 1914-45.

Sam119

Reviewer Glenn Carter of Comics Bulletin described SAM119 issue 1 as: "a blend of Cyberpunk, William Gibson, and George Orwell", and there are clear indications of the influence of writers such as Gibson on the work.

Sinister Street

George Orwell enjoyed the book illicitly as a prep school boy at St Cyprian's School in Eastbourne where the headmistress, Mrs 'Flip' Wilkes, gave a prize for the best list of books read.

Tangocrisis

In different interviews 020 / Tangocrisis acknowledged several influences within and outside the music industry in their lyrical content, such as Pink Floyd, The Clash, Bob Marley, Erich Fromm, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

Victor Gollancz Ltd

Victor Gollancz commissioned George Orwell to write about the urban working class in the North of England; the result was The Road to Wigan Pier.