99 Fun Facts About George Orwell

What was George Orwell's real name?

Eric Arthur Blair is the name on his gravestone, which reads 'Here lies Eric Arthur Blair' with no mention of George Orwell.

In which country was Orwell born?

India: he was born in Motihari in 1903, and his mother took him to England when he was one year old.

Orwell's father was a colonial civil servant in which department?

The Opium Department kept his father abroad, and apart from a brief 1907 visit, Orwell did not see him again for years.

Which future writer did Orwell first meet at St Cyprian's prep school in Eastbourne?

Cyril Connolly beat him to the school's Harrow History Prize, but later, as editor of Horizon, published several of Orwell's essays.

When Orwell first met his childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicom, what was he doing?

Standing on his head in a field, he explained, got you noticed far more than being the right way up.

Which famous novelist taught Orwell French at Eton?

Aldous Huxley later wrote to his former pupil about Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicting rulers would prefer infant conditioning to 'clubs and prisons'.

Which hard-working Animal Farm character do the pigs sell to the knacker after he collapses?

Boxer is carted off in a knacker's van, but Squealer tells the other animals that a vet had bought the van and not yet painted over the old name.

Which two Orwell essays draw on his Burma police years?

'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' both come from Burma, and in the second he admits he shot the elephant 'solely to avoid looking a fool'.

Which Nineteen Eighty-Four character risks death or a labour camp by secretly keeping a diary?

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old news items, so that every Party prediction appears to have come true.

Which illness did Orwell catch in Burma in 1927, before he resigned to become a writer?

Dengue fever put him on sick leave from Burma, and he never returned to his police post there.

Which American writer's book The People of the Abyss inspired Orwell's tramping expeditions?

Jack London had lived rough in the East End in 1902, sleeping in workhouses and on the streets, and Orwell copied his method.

Which menial job did Orwell take at a fashionable Paris hotel?

Dishwashing in the hotel's cellars, as a lowly plongeur, became the heart of the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.

Which poet, then at Faber & Faber, rejected the manuscript of Down and Out in Paris and London?

T. S. Eliot turned Orwell down again at Faber twelve years later, when he rejected Animal Farm in 1944.

Which revolutionary song does Old Major teach the animals in Animal Farm?

Beasts of England is later abolished by a special decree of Napoleon, and the animals are forbidden to sing it.

Which publisher brought out Orwell's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London?

Victor Gollancz took it after Jonathan Cape and then Faber & Faber had turned it down.

The 'Orwell' in George Orwell was taken from what?

A river in Suffolk, the River Orwell, gave him the surname, which he liked as 'a good round English name'.

Orwell's job at Booklovers' Corner, a Hampstead second-hand bookshop, informed which novel?

He worked afternoons, wrote in the mornings and lodged with the shop's Esperantist owners.

In Wigan in 1936, Orwell lodged in dirty rooms above what?

A tripe shop sat below the squalid lodgings that fill the opening chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier.

The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937 for which subscription scheme?

The Left Book Club edition carried a nervous preface from the publisher, who feared the book's second half would offend members.

Whom did Orwell marry on 9 June 1936?

Eileen O'Shaughnessy met him at his landlady's party in 1935, and in the Spanish Civil War she typed in the ILP office while he fought.

Which American novelist told Orwell over dinner in Paris that fighting in Spain was 'sheer stupidity'?

Henry Miller scoffed at his reasons for going, yet in the 1940 essay 'Inside the Whale' Orwell praised Miller as a rare imaginative talent.

Which militia did Orwell join in the Spanish Civil War?

The POUM took him because he arrived with Independent Labour Party papers, and in June 1937 it was declared illegal and its members hunted.

Where was Orwell hit by a sniper's bullet in Spain in 1937?

In the throat, by a sniper near Huesca, and the wound got him declared medically unfit for further service.

Which invented language in Nineteen Eighty-Four is designed to make rebellious thoughts literally unthinkable?

Newspeak drew on Basic English, the 850-word simplified English that Orwell once championed and later turned against.

Which book came out of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War?

Homage to Catalonia was a commercial flop in 1938 and found its readers only in the 1950s, after Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Which pig does Napoleon drive off Animal Farm with his dogs?

Snowball is then blamed for everything that goes wrong, even the collapse of the windmill he had designed.

Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while wintering for his health in which country?

Morocco was a half-year escape from the English winter, secretly paid for by the novelist L. H. Myers.

During the Second World War, Orwell worked for which organisation?

The BBC's Broadcasting House had a Room 101, which is said to have inspired the torture chamber in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Which Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale did Orwell adapt for radio in 1943?

The Emperor's New Clothes aired in November 1943, and in 1945 he subtitled Animal Farm 'A Fairy Story'.

Orwell's regular personal column in Tribune, begun in December 1943, was called what?

As I Please ran while he was Tribune's literary editor, a job he left in early 1945 to report from Europe for The Observer.

Why did Orwell's regular publisher refuse Animal Farm in 1944?

It attacked a wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and Jonathan Cape also backed out after a Ministry of Information official warned him off.

Which given names did the Orwells choose for the baby boy they adopted in 1944?

Richard Horatio was three weeks old when the couple adopted him, and Orwell later took the two-year-old to live on a Scottish island.

What did Orwell salvage from the rubble in a wheelbarrow after a V-1 bomb hit his flat in 1944?

His books went into the wheelbarrow, and he also sifted the rubble for the Animal Farm typescript, which survived undamaged.

How did Orwell's first wife die in March 1945?

An allergic reaction to anaesthetic is the usual account, though the inquest recorded heart failure under ether and chloroform during a hysterectomy.

Which slogan do Animal Farm's sheep bleat?

Four legs good, two legs bad is later changed to 'Four legs good, two legs better!' once the pigs start walking upright.

On which Scottish island did Orwell write Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Jura nearly cost him his life in 1947, when a boating trip into the Gulf of Corryvreckan's whirlpool went badly wrong.

Which Nineteen Eighty-Four ministry houses Room 101?

The Ministry of Love maintains law and order, and in its Room 101 prisoners are made to face their own worst fear until they break.

Which new drug was imported to treat Orwell's tuberculosis in 1948, with a request reaching the Minister of Health?

Streptomycin reached him from the US with David Astor's help, but the drug gave him severe side effects.

In 1949, Orwell gave a list of writers he considered pro-communist to which Foreign Office unit?

The Information Research Department was recruiting writers for anti-communist propaganda, and his list named people he thought should not be trusted with it.

Sonia Brownell is believed to be the model for which Orwell character?

Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the character some friends saw in her, and the couple married by special licence in his hospital room.

In his 1946 essay 'Why I Write', Orwell said his aim was to make political writing into what?

An art, he wrote, adding that every serious line he had written since 1936 was against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.

Where is Orwell buried?

Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire had no link to Orwell, but his friend David Astor arranged the plot to meet his wish for a Church of England burial.

Which modern writer did Orwell say influenced him most, for telling a story 'without frills'?

He listed Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens and Flaubert among the writers he never tired of.

Which essay did The Observer's editor David Astor hand to every new recruit?

'Politics and the English Language' ends its six rules with a get-out: break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell may have coined which geopolitical term in his 1945 essay 'You and the Atom Bomb'?

'Cold war' came to mean the US-Soviet standoff after April 1947, when financier Bernard Baruch used it in a speech.

Which intelligence agency was secretly behind the 1954 animated film of Animal Farm?

The CIA had agents buy the film rights from Orwell's widow, and the film changed the ending so that the other animals overthrow the pigs.

Orwell's 1946 essay describing an imagined ideal British pub is titled what?

'The Moon Under Water' does not exist, Orwell admits at the end, and the nearest real pub he knew had only eight of his ten qualities.

Which Orwell essay, shelved in 1946 as awkward during rationing, was finally published with an apology in 2019?

'British Cookery' came with his recipes, and beside the orange marmalade a handwritten note says 'Bad recipe!'

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Britain is a province called Airstrip One within which superstate?

Oceania switches its enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia, and the Party insists it has always been at war with Eastasia.

In Orwell's 'Shooting an Elephant', what does the narrator realise a colonial ruler destroys by becoming a tyrant?

His own freedom is the price: facing the crowd with a rifle, the narrator sees that the ruler must do whatever the ruled expect of him.

Why does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' finally admit he killed an animal he wanted to spare?

To avoid looking foolish is the motive he confesses in the last line, wondering whether any other European grasped that pride, not duty, pulled the trigger.

What has made the normally tame elephant in 'Shooting an Elephant' break its chain and rampage through Moulmein?

An attack of musth, the periodic hormonal frenzy of bull elephants, set it loose; the narrator expects the fit to wear off and leave the animal harmless again.

Where does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' finally catch up with the runaway animal as it calmly eats grass?

In a paddy field the elephant stood peacefully feeding, and the narrator knew at once that he ought not to shoot a working animal whose frenzy was already fading.

In 'Shooting an Elephant', during which sport does the narrator recall being tripped up as a hated European in Moulmein?

Football was one of the narrator's petty humiliations in Moulmein, alongside the insults called after him in the street from a safe distance.

What does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' later hear had happened to the animal's body by that afternoon?

Stripped to the bones is how the carcass ended up within hours, since the crowd that had followed the rifle wanted the meat as much as the show.

What does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' do when repeated shots fail to end the wounded animal's agony?

He walks away, unable to bear the tortured breathing any longer, and only afterwards learns that the elephant took half an hour to die.

Why is the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' privately glad the animal had killed a labourer?

It made the killing legal: a man's death put the narrator in the right under the law, which held that a mad elephant must be killed if its owner fails to control it.

In 'Shooting an Elephant', what do the younger Europeans in Moulmein say about the narrator's decision to shoot?

The animal was worth more than the dead labourer, they said, a verdict that lays bare how cheaply the colonisers valued the lives of those they ruled.

Which figure does the armed narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' liken himself to, pushed about by the crowd's will?

A puppet is how he sees himself: he holds the gun, yet the unarmed crowd at his back decides what he does with it.

Why can the elephant's mahout, its only handler, do nothing to help in Orwell's 'Shooting an Elephant'?

He went the wrong way: the mahout set out in pursuit in the opposite direction and was twelve hours' journey off when the animal reached the bazaar.

How does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' travel to the poor quarter where the animal was last seen?

On a pony he set out with an old .44 Winchester, far too small to kill an elephant, hoping the noise alone might frighten the animal.

Which farm animal had the elephant in 'Shooting an Elephant' killed, besides wrecking a hut and raiding fruit stalls?

A cow lay among the damage the elephant left on its way through the bazaar, a trail that seemed minor until a man's body turned up in the mud.

Which municipal vehicle does the rampaging elephant in 'Shooting an Elephant' damage on its way through the bazaar?

The rubbish van was vandalised after the elephant had already flattened a hut and raided a fruit stall, a spree that turned deadly soon afterwards.

Which group does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' single out as the worst for jeering at Europeans?

Buddhist priests come off worst in his account: several thousand young ones lived in the town, and mocking Europeans in the street seemed to be their main occupation.

Which colonial title of respect for a European does the narrator of 'Shooting an Elephant' feel bound to live up to?

Sahib was the respectful address for a European in British Burma, and the narrator decides that whoever bears it must look resolute before a watching crowd.

According to George Stuart, who knew Orwell in Burma, how was Orwell punished for shooting a valuable working elephant?

Posted to a remote town is Stuart's version: he said firms prized their working elephants, and that Orwell was soon moved from Moulmein to a quiet station far to the north.

Which construction fills about a fifth of 'Politics and the English Language', despite one of its own rules against it?

The passive voice makes up a little over 20 percent of Orwell's constructions, by one usage dictionary's count, against 13 percent at most in the periodicals it compared.

In 'Politics and the English Language', what does Orwell say most political speech and writing sets out to justify?

The indefensible, he argues, can only be excused in euphemism and vagueness, because the plain arguments for it are too brutal for most people to face.

Which label does 'Politics and the English Language' give worn-out phrases such as swan song and Achilles' heel?

Dying metaphors are worn-out images Orwell says writers reuse to save inventing their own, often without knowing what the picture first meant.

What does Orwell conclude about the decline of written English at the end of 'Politics and the English Language'?

It can be reversed, he insists: bad habits spread by imitation, so writers who take the trouble can shed them, and he offers six rules to help.

Which ancient language's borrowings does 'Politics and the English Language' blame for pretentious modern prose?

Latin is the culprit: Orwell calls the fashionable manner a Latinized style, and his fix is the short everyday English word wherever one exists.

Which Old Testament book supplies the verse Orwell rewrites as bloated prose in 'Politics and the English Language'?

Ecclesiastes gave him a verse about the race not always going to the swift, which he turned into abstract jargon with far more syllables and no images at all.

Which journal first published Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' in 1946, after another turned it down?

Horizon printed it as Orwell's last major article for the journal, after George Weidenfeld's magazine Contact, for which it was written, rejected it.

Who taught the young Orwell the trick, used in 'Politics and the English Language', of rewriting Bible verses badly?

His headmaster's wife, Cicely Vaughan Wilkes, known to the boys as Flip, would turn King James passages into poor English to show how good the originals were.

A 1999 study found 'Politics and the English Language' reprinted 118 times in readers for which kind of college course?

Composition classes made the essay a fixture: the study counted it in 325 editions of 58 readers published in the half-century after it appeared.

Why did Orwell deliberately get himself arrested for drunkenness in London's East End in 1931?

To see Christmas in jail was the plan, but the Bethnal Green police did not think his offence imprisonable and released him after two days in a cell.

Which crop did Orwell help harvest in Kent in 1931, following an East End tradition he later gave to a heroine?

Hops drew him to the Kent fields for a late-summer stint of picking, recorded in a diary and reused for the heroine of A Clergyman's Daughter.

Which job did Orwell take in 1932 at The Hawthorns in Hayes, on the western edge of the capital?

Schoolteacher was his trade for nearly two years: The Hawthorns was a tiny private school for boys, with about fifteen pupils and one other master.

What did Orwell name the poodle puppy he acquired after returning from Spain, alongside a cockerel called Henry Ford?

Marx the poodle joined the goats at his Hertfordshire cottage, where Orwell settled down to animal husbandry and to a memoir of his months at the front.

In which Spanish city was Orwell caught up in street fighting between rival Republican factions in May 1937?

Barcelona's May Days set the Republic's own factions against each other, and Orwell spent much of the fighting on a rooftop with a stack of novels.

Which volunteer force did Orwell join in 1940 after a medical board declared him unfit for any military service?

The Home Guard made him a sergeant, and he hoped the force might grow into a revolutionary people's militia rather than a stopgap against invasion.

What nearly drowned Orwell in August 1947 on a boating trip off the Scottish coast with his three-year-old son?

A whirlpool, the Corryvreckan, almost took the party after the boat's engine sheared off; stranded on a rock, they were rescued when lobstermen spotted their fire.

Where did Orwell marry Sonia Brownell in October 1949, three months before his death, with David Astor as best man?

In his hospital room at University College Hospital the bedridden Orwell was married, and he died there the following January.

Which Orwell essay, published only after his death, is a bitter memoir of his years at an Eastbourne boarding school?

'Such, Such Were the Joys' covers his school years from eight to thirteen; Orwell asked that it be held back until the people most concerned were dead, and it first ran in an American review in 1952.

Which pastime did Orwell name in 1940 as the thing he cared most about outside his work?

Gardening, vegetables above all, was his answer; at his Hertfordshire cottage he spent hours on the plot and planted a rose garden that outlived him.

What did Orwell have tattooed on each knuckle in Burma, a rural charm said to ward off bullets and snakebites?

A small blue circle on each knuckle stayed with him for life, as did the pencil moustache he adopted in imitation of British army officers stationed in Burma.

In which city, the last royal capital of Burma, did Orwell attend police training school after arriving in 1922?

Mandalay housed the police training school, the first stop in a five-year career that carried the young Etonian through a string of postings across Burma.

Which relative of Orwell was living in Moulmein when he arrived there as a police officer in 1926?

His grandmother on his mother's side lived there: Orwell's mother, Ida Limouzin, had grown up in Moulmein, where her French father ran speculative business ventures.

What does John Flory, hero of Orwell's Burmese Days, have on his face in the shape of a ragged crescent?

A birthmark marks out the jaded teak merchant, who spends three weeks of every month in the jungle and has no real friend among his fellow expatriates.

Which institution in Orwell's Burmese Days is pressed to elect its first native member, setting off the plot?

The European Club is the centre of expatriate life in the novel's backwater setting, and a corrupt magistrate ruins a rival doctor's name to take the seat himself.

Why did Orwell's novel Burmese Days first appear in the United States in 1934, a year before its British edition?

Fear of libel suits made his British publisher balk, since the town and several characters were drawn too closely from life; names were altered for the edition that followed.

In Orwell's essay 'A Hanging', what does the condemned prisoner step around on his way to the gallows?

A puddle of rainwater is what he sidesteps, and that tiny act of care makes the narrator see that a living, thinking person is about to be destroyed.

Which poet of the British Empire did Orwell both admire and condemn, calling him a 'good bad poet'?

Rudyard Kipling struck Orwell as a gifted writer whose work was morally insensitive yet undeniably seductive, able to express realities that more enlightened authors missed.

Which independence leader's autobiography did Orwell weigh up in a 1949 essay for the American magazine Partisan Review?

Mahatma Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth drew both praise and criticism from Orwell, who asked how far nonviolence could succeed and how saintliness sat with politics.

Which town in Upper Burma, Orwell's last posting, was the model for Kyauktada in his novel Burmese Days?

Katha sits at the head of a branch railway on the Irrawaddy, just like its fictional double, and was the last place Orwell served before his return voyage.

Whose prose opens the five bad passages in 'Politics and the English Language', faulted for five negatives in 53 words?

Harold Laski heads the list, followed by Lancelot Hogben, an essay by Paul Goodman, a communist pamphlet and a reader's letter to Tribune.

Which abandoned farmhouse in the Inner Hebrides became Orwell's base in 1946 while he wrote his last novel?

Barnhill became home in May 1946, when Orwell moved there with his two-year-old son, whom he is said to have treated as a miniature adult.

Which animal does John Flory shoot on a hunting trip in Orwell's Burmese Days, promising Elizabeth the skin?

A leopard falls to Flory's gun, but the skin is ruined by bungled curing and arrives mangy and stinking, sealing his failure as a suitor.

Which corrupt Burmese magistrate plots a rebellion and smears a rival doctor in Orwell's novel Burmese Days?

U Po Kyin stages the revolt so that the doctor will take the blame, and after the hero's death he wins the social prize he had schemed for.