Churchillian and Orwellian
Sep. 19th, 2019 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Churchill and Orwell - The Fight for Freedom, by Thomas E Ricks
This was a random selection from the work book sale, but the time I chose to read it was hardly random, as one Churchill fan had recently ascended to the Prime Ministership in a time of national crisis. Unlike his predecessor, this crisis was self-inflicted, and the current incumbent shut down Parliament in an Orwellian attempt to silence debate and dissent.
There is no doubt that Churchill was the right leader at the right time, but had history been different, the book acknowledges he would have been little more than a footnote in history, an entertaining writer as an adventurer, journalist and historian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For Orwell, too, the start was not especially promising, but his bit-part in the Spanish Civil War gave him the energy to write about freedom and totalitarianism, in any form. Animal Farm struggled to find a publisher in the wake of the Second World War, but it sold out immediately.
Churchill's life seems to have more ups and downs, from escapades in South Africa in the Boer War, through mixed political fortunes in the First World War, the wilderness of the 1930s, triumph in the Second World War, and sharp decline thereafter. Our folk memories are highly selective and cover only a narrow segment of his life. Orwell, on the other hand, suffers more from the downs: an indifferent if humanising career as a Police Officer in colonial Burma, a lucky escape with a neck wound in the Spanish Civil War, a brush with the divisions and purges of communism, a long period of declining health. The successes of Animal Farm and 1984 were immediate, but late - very late - in his career.
The two never met, but Ricks's joint biography carefully joins the threads of their lives together. This isn't a detailed history of either man, but it isn't superficial, either. Both names have become adjectives, but in different senses.
This was a random selection from the work book sale, but the time I chose to read it was hardly random, as one Churchill fan had recently ascended to the Prime Ministership in a time of national crisis. Unlike his predecessor, this crisis was self-inflicted, and the current incumbent shut down Parliament in an Orwellian attempt to silence debate and dissent.
There is no doubt that Churchill was the right leader at the right time, but had history been different, the book acknowledges he would have been little more than a footnote in history, an entertaining writer as an adventurer, journalist and historian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For Orwell, too, the start was not especially promising, but his bit-part in the Spanish Civil War gave him the energy to write about freedom and totalitarianism, in any form. Animal Farm struggled to find a publisher in the wake of the Second World War, but it sold out immediately.
Churchill's life seems to have more ups and downs, from escapades in South Africa in the Boer War, through mixed political fortunes in the First World War, the wilderness of the 1930s, triumph in the Second World War, and sharp decline thereafter. Our folk memories are highly selective and cover only a narrow segment of his life. Orwell, on the other hand, suffers more from the downs: an indifferent if humanising career as a Police Officer in colonial Burma, a lucky escape with a neck wound in the Spanish Civil War, a brush with the divisions and purges of communism, a long period of declining health. The successes of Animal Farm and 1984 were immediate, but late - very late - in his career.
The two never met, but Ricks's joint biography carefully joins the threads of their lives together. This isn't a detailed history of either man, but it isn't superficial, either. Both names have become adjectives, but in different senses.