Orwell’s ISLAND

One mustn’t take George Orwell at face value. He is feted as one of Britain’s greatest writers of the early 20th century, yet he was actually a worldly writer, born Eric Arthur Blair in India, the son of a British official in the Indian civil service. He wrote about living “down and out” in Paris and London, yet he was the great-great grandson the 8th Earl of Westmorland, raised in comfortable Oxfordshire middle-class surrounds, and he served as an Imperial Police officer in Burma (now Myanmar). Perhaps most remarkably of all, in one of his most well-known works, Orwell wrote about the oppressive nature of a totalitarian superstate while spending the last few years of his life on the remote Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. His transformation from imperial servant to socialist commentator was complete.