The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  “It is a sort of world-within-a-world”—Ibid., p. 144.

  “as a kind of penance”—Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 29.

  “shabby-genteel”—Orwell, CW V, p. 115.

  “not thirty yet”—Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell IV: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 4.

  “She knew well enough”—Orwell, CW V, p. 15.

  “facecrime”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 65.

  “a boot stamping”—Ibid., p. 280.

  “I am afraid I have made”—Orwell letter to Jack Common, October 5, 1936, The Complete Works of George Orwell X: A Kind of Compulsion 1903–36 (Secker & Warburg, 2000), 327, p. 507.

  “hate, fear and despise”—Orwell, CW V, p. 127.

  “drives away the very people”—Ibid., p. 159.

  “aeroplanes, tractors”—Ibid., p. 201.

  “left-wingers of all complexions”—Ibid., p. 205.

  “admirable propaganda”—H. J. Laski, Left News, March 1937, reprinted in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 104.

  “The truth is”—Victor Gollancz, preface to Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier, CW V, p. 221.

  “gut socialist”—Wadhams, p. 95.

  “nothing else can save us”—Orwell, CW V, p. 204.

  “smells of crankishness”—Ibid., p. 201.

  “began to realize”—Rees, p. 146.

  “The Spanish Civil War”—Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), p. 267.

  “common decency,” “a plague of initials” and “I was not only uninterested”—Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell VI: Homage to Catalonia (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 188.

  “a world where lost and lonely people”—Jason Gurney, quoted in Beevor, p. 178.

  Up to 35,000 men—see Beevor, p. 177.

  “It was in part an anarchist’s war”—Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (Hamish Hamilton, 1950), p. 245.

  “it seemed certain”—Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930–1940 in Great Britain (Hamish Hamilton, 1940), p. 249.

  “Though he was a wonderful chap”—Paris Review, no. 28, Summer-Fall 1962.

  “It was overwhelming”—Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (Faber & Faber, 1937), p. 69.

  “It is as if the masses”—Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground: Essays: 1927–1944 (Routledge, 1945), p. 186.

  “I have come to Spain”—Crick, p. 317.

  “a bad copy of 1914–18”—Orwell, “My Country Right or Left,” Folios of New Writing, no. 2, Autumn 1940, CW XII, 694, p. 271.

  “firewood, food, tobacco”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 22.

  “Nothing ever happened”—Ibid., p. 47, and CW IV, p. 41.

  “This is not a war”—Ibid., p. 32.

  “breathed the air of equality”—Ibid., p. 83.

  “not less but more”—Ibid., p. 186.

  “She caught George’s dreams”—T. R. Fyvel, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 136.

  “Come on, you bastards!”—D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (Vintage, 2004), p. 214.

  “visibly a fellow creature”—“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” CW XIII, 1421, p. 501.

  so alarmed by a rat—see Bob Edwards’s account in Coppard and Crick, p. 147.

  “If there is one thing”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 59.

  “The political side of the war”—Ibid., p. 200.

  “She was the first person”—Rees, p. 147.

  “It is an atmosphere”—Borkenau, p. 241.

  “liked by nobody”—Ibid., p. 182.

  “A Trotskyist”—Ibid., p. 240.

  “It goes without saying”—Beevor, p. 226.

  “an unmistakable and horrible feeling”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 97.

  “a furtive, gutted look”—John Dos Passos, The Theme Is Freedom (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1956), p. 141.

  “to be talking to an honest man”—Ibid., p. 145.

  “The match that fired”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 225.

  “It was the first time”—Ibid., p. 121.

  “Tear the mask”—Ibid., p. 126.

  “To hear what was said”—Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell II: Burmese Days (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 140.

  “The only broadcasting service”—Taylor, p. 205.

  “One of the dreariest effects”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 208.

  “I hope I shall get the chance”—Orwell letter to Victor Gollancz, May 9, 1937, in CW XI, 368, p. 23.

  “almost a mental disease”—Beevor, p. 271.

  “This was simply”—Crossman (ed.), p. 253.

  “I gradually acquired”—Ibid., p. 254.

  “They couldn’t hit a bull”—Wadhams, p. 90.

  “a violent resentment”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 139.

  “Get out”—Taylor, p. 230.

  “the best of the bunch”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 39.

  “his face was no more”—Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Pimlico, 2008), p. 410.

  “nightmare atmosphere”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 151.

  “however little you were actually conspiring”—Ibid., p. 148.

  “pronounced Trotskyists”—David Caute, Politics and the Novel During the Cold War (Transaction, 2010), p. 47.

  “It was a queer business”—Orwell letter to Rayner Heppenstall, July 31, 1937, CW XI, 381, p. 53.

  “It was about the only time”—Wadhams, p. 96.

  “He said he used to take”—Ibid., p. 93.

  “Almost every journalist”—Quoted in Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die (Constable, 2008), p. 15.

  “The Spanish War and other events”—Orwell, “Why I Write,” CW XVIII, 3007, p. 319.

  “There has been a quite deliberate conspiracy”—Orwell, “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” New English Weekly, July 29 and September 2, 1937, CW XI, 378, p. 46.

  “there can be no argument”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 248.

  “I found myself feeling very strongly”—Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, February 4, 1944, The Complete Works of George Orwell XVI: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth 1943–1944 (Secker & Warburg, 2001), 2416, p. 88.

  “It was my purpose”—Warburg, p. 9.

  “It shows us the heart”—Quoted in Miriam Gross (ed.), The World of George Orwell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 144.

  “I warn everyone”—Orwell, CW VI, p. 227.

  “If I had not been angry”—Orwell, “Why I Write,” CW XVIII, 3007, p. 320.

  “To me your book”—Quoted in Crick, p. 363.

  “It is a most encouraging thing”—Orwell, Review of The Communist International by Franz Borkenau, New English Weekly, September 22, 1938, CW XI, 485, p. 204.

  “Civilisation is bound to perish”—Borkenau, p. 257.

  “continued to proclaim”—Wadhams, p. 42.

  “literature of disillusionment”—Orwell, “Arthur Koestler,” Tribune, September 11, 1944, CW XVI, 2548, p. 393.

  “is one of those men”—Orwell, Review of The Mysterious Mr. Bull by Wyndham Lewis and The School for Dictators by Ignazio Silone, New English Weekly, June 8, 1939, in CW XI, 547, p. 355.

  “a form of Socialism”—Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” CW XII, 600, p. 102.

  “a mechanism for explaining”—Orwell, Review of The Civil War in Spain by Frank Jellinek, The New Leader, July 8, 1938, in CW XI, 462, p. 174.

  “his speech though delivered”—Orwell diary entry, March 16, 1936, in CW X, 294, p. 456.

  “Mosley will bear watching”—Orwell, CW V, p. 197.

  “had an almost irresistible fascination”—Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” CW XII, 600, p. 101.

  “tolerated and even defended”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 213.

  “The formula 2 + 2 = 5”—Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1938)
, p. 240.

  “The peculiar horror”—Orwell, Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell, The Adelphi, January 1939, in CW XI, 520, pp. 311–12.

  “I was guilty”—Lyons, p. 628.

  “So many weary”—Ibid., p. 635.

  CHAPTER 2: UTOPIA FEVER

  “What fun it must have been”—Orwell, Review of My Life: The Autobiography of Havelock Ellis, Adelphi, May 1940, CW XII, 617, p. 155.

  “A map of the world”—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man (privately printed, 1895), p. 43.

  “permanent happiness”—Orwell (as “John Freeman”), “Can Socialists be Happy?,” Tribune, December 24, 1943, CW XVI, 2397, p. 39.

  “some central-heated”—Ibid., p. 42.

  “Whoever tries to imagine”—Ibid., p. 43.

  “Happiness is notoriously”—Orwell, “Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” Polemic, no. 5, September-October 1946, CW XVIII, 3089, p. 427.

  “some dismal Marxist Utopia”—Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell I: Down and Out in Paris and London (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 121.

  “On the whole”—Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill,” Horizon, September 1941, CW XIII, 850, p. 30.

  “quiet, yet observant”—Frances Elizabeth Willard, “An Interview with Edward Bellamy,” Our Day, vol. 4, no. 24, December 1889.

  “nervous, dyspeptic”—Sylvia E. Bowman, Edward Bellamy (Twayne Publishers, 1986), p. 62.

  “Let us bear in mind”—Edward Bellamy, “Letter to the People’s Party,” The New Nation, October 22, 1892, quoted in Kenneth M. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings 1888–1900 (Kent State University Press, 1976), p. 21.

  “I am particularly desirous”—Quoted in Bellamy, p. xxxi.

  “debated by all”—Quoted in Franklin Rosemont, “Bellamy’s Radicalism Reclaimed,” in Daphne Patai, ed., Looking Backward, 1988–1888 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 158.

  “I suppose you have seen or read”—Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 584.

  “an exceedingly remarkable book”—Leo Tolstoy, diary entry, June 30, 1889.

  “the latest and best”—J. R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson (eds.), The Mark Twain Encyclopaedia (Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), p. 69.

  “Bellamy is the Moses of today”—Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886–1896 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), p. 48.

  “a child of the Bellamy ideal”—John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (Riverrun, 2017), p. 390.

  “Bellamy’s Looking Backward in reverse”—Harry Scherman, quoted in Eugene Reynal letter to J. Edgar Hoover, April 22, 1949.

  “the solidarity of the race”—Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 78.

  “with some impatience”—Edward Bellamy, “How I Came to Write Looking Backward,” The Nationalist, May 1889.

  “the sober and morally-minded”—Pfaelzer, p. 44.

  “You have taken on an impossible task”—Quoted in Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 132.

  “a cloud palace,” “stumbled over”—Bellamy, “How I Came to Write Looking Backward.”

  “intended, in all seriousness”—Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 195.

  “the logical outcome”—Bellamy, p. 68.

  “all Socialist thought”—Orwell, “What Is Socialism?,” January 31, 1946, CW XIII, 2876, p. 60.

  “the hygiene, the labour-saving devices”—Orwell, Review of An Unknown Land by Viscount Samuel, The Listener, December 24, 1942, The Complete Works of George Orwell XIV: Keeping Our Little Corner Clean 1942–1943 (Secker & Warburg, 2001), 1768, p. 254.

  “festering mass”—Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 189.

  “The only safe way”—William Morris, Commonweal, vol. 5, no. 80, June 22, 1889.

  “deep-seated aversion”—Quoted in Milton Cantor, “The Backward Look of Bellamy’s Socialism,” Patai (ed.), p. 21.

  “saw the world with new eyes”—Bowman, p. 4.

  “the inferno of poverty”—Pfaelzer, p. 46.

  “some plan”—Bowman, p. 6.

  “Hard to live”—Ibid., p. 8.

  “an impending social cataclysm”—Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 11.

  “When I came to consider”—Quoted in Cantor, Patai (ed.), p. 33.

  “In the radicalness of the opinions”—Edward Bellamy letter to William Dean Howells, June 17, 1888, quoted in Pfaelzer, p. 43.

  “the followers of the red flag”—Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 148.

  “a hideous, ghastly mistake”—Ibid., p. 191.

  “the belief that the truth”—Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan,” Politics and Letters, Summer 1948, CW XIX, 3364, p. 289.

  “A vast conspiracy”—Pfaelzer, p. 121.

  “not only aroused”—Quoted in Rosemont, Patai (ed.), pp. 162–63.

  “Edwardina”—Quoted in Pfaelzer, p. 36.

  “the obvious, necessary”—Edward Bellamy, Equality (William Heinemann, 1897), p. 14.

  “What a pity”—Quoted in Rosemont, Patai (ed.), p. 191.

  “books on the twentieth”—The Literary World, July 19, 1890, quoted in Roemer, p. 7.

  “The frontier has gone”—Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893.

  “a counterblast”—Quoted in Warren W. Wagar, “Dreams of Reason,” in Patai (ed.), p. 113.

  “cockney paradise”—MacCarthy, p. 584.

  “a sort of goody-goody”—Orwell, “Can Socialists Be Happy?,” CW XVI, 2397, p. 40.

  “we should most of us be very unhappy”—C. R. Attlee, The Social Worker (G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1920), p. 141.

  “Have they got it all right”—Jerome K. Jerome, “The New Utopia,” Diary of a Pilgrimage (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1891), p. 265.

  “one language, one law, one life”—Ibid., p. 276.

  “Memory is the principle”—Edward Bellamy, Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (D. Appleton, 1880), quoted in Rosemont, Patai (ed.), p. 151.

  “rending the veil of self”—Edward Bellamy, “To Whom This May Come” in The Blindman’s World and Other Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 1898), quoted in Wagar, Patai (ed.), p. 112.

  “Do you begin to see”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 279.

  “rather painful reading”—Orwell, Review of The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde, Observer, May 9, 1948, CW XIX, 3395, p. 333.

  “may demand the impossible”—Ibid., p. 334.

  CHAPTER 3: THE WORLD WE’RE GOING DOWN INTO

  “The future, at any rate”—Orwell, Review of Journey Through the War Mind by C. E. M. Joad, Time and Tide, no. 8, 1940, CW XII, 635, pp. 178–79.

  “As it is if I start in August”—Orwell letter to Jack Common, May 22, 1938, in CW XI, 443, p. 149.

  “stop thinking”—Quoted in Crick, p. 367.

  “We called him Marx”—Eileen Blair letter to Norah Myles, January 1, 1938, The Lost Orwell, compiled and annotated by Peter Davison (Timewell Press, 2006), p. 72.

  “rather a dull country”—Orwell letter to John Sceats, November 24, 1938, CW XI, 504, p. 237.

  “a thin disguise for jingo imperialism”—Orwell, Review of Lewis and Silone, June 8, 1939, CW XI, 547, p. 354.

  “fascising”—Orwell letter to Herbert Read, March 5, 1939, in CW XI, 536, p. 340.

  “that if Fascism wins”—E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951), p. 23.

  One of his favourite quotations—Orwell, Review of The Tree of Gernika by G. L. Steer and Spanish Testament by Arthur Koestler, Time and Tide, February 5, 1938, CW XI, 421, p. 113.

  “Fascism after all”—Orwell letter to Geoffrey Gorer, September 15, 1937, CW XI, 397, p. 80.

  “Fascism and so-called democracy”—Orwell letter to Amy Charlesworth, August 30, 1937, CW XI, 393, p. 77.

  He even planned—see Orwell letter to Her
bert Read, January 4, 1939, CW XI, 522, p. 313.

  “the future must be catastrophic”—Orwell, War-time Diary, June 8, 1940, CW XII, 637, p. 181.

  “the feeling of futility”—Orwell, Review of Personal Record 1928–1939 by Julian Green, Time and Tide, April 13, 1940, in CW XII, 611, p. 145.

  “But the dugout”—Eileen Blair letter to Marjorie Dakin, September 27, 1938, CW XI, 487, p. 205.

  “a stifling, stultifying world”—Orwell, CW II, p. 69.

  “It is a corrupting thing”—Ibid., p. 70.

  “Who spies with jealous, watchful care”—Orwell, CW IV, p. 168.

  “money-priesthood”—Ibid., p. 46.

  “thousand million slaves”—Ibid., p. 166.

  “packs a world of lies”—Ibid., p. 58.

  “Of course you are perfectly right”—Orwell letter to Julian Symons, May 10, 1948, CW XIX, 3397, p. 336.

  “silly potboilers”—Orwell, Notes for My Literary Executor, March 31, 1945, CW XVII, 2648, p. 114.

  “a revolutionary in love with 1910”—Cyril Connolly, Horizon, September 1945, reprinted in Meyers (ed.), p. 199.

  “people then had something”—Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell VII: Coming Up for Air (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 109.

  “as if I’d got X-rays”—Ibid., p. 26.

  “The world we’re going down into”—Ibid., p. 157.

  “the things that you tell yourself”—Ibid., p. 238.

  “It’s a ghastly thing”—Ibid., p. 156.

  “throw sulfuric acid”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 180.

  “new kind of men”—Orwell, CW VII, pp. 168–69.

  “She had not a thought”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 69.

  “Celluloid, rubber”—Ibid., p. 24.

  “I dislike big towns”—Orwell letter to Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, April 17, 1940, CW XI, 613, p. 148.

  “Only a little while”—Orwell, CW IV, p. 258.

  “We swim in it”—Orwell, CW VII, pp. 15–16.

  “It was our thought”—New York Times, October 31, 1938.

  “covering up the truth”—Quoted in Rich Heldenfels, “ ‘War of the Worlds’ still vivid at 75,” Akron Beacon Journal, October 26, 2013.

  “The complexity of modern finance”—Hadley Cantril, The Invasion From Mars (Princeton University Press, 1940), p. 154.

  “so many things we hear”—Ibid., p. 158.

  “cannot tell lies”—Orwell, Review of The Invasion From Mars by Hadley Cantril, New Statesman and Nation, October 26, 1940, in CW XII, 702, p. 279.