On the morning of the 4th December 1926 a car was found abandoned ... just a few miles from Guildford. The car’s owner was the famous crime writer Agatha Christie. Vanishings: Agatha Christie
She had completely vanished. ibid.
It became known as the Great Sunday Hunt. ibid.
The Mystery of Mrs Christie. Hunt With Hurricane Lamps To-night For the Authoress Lost Near Downs. Evening Standard
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. George Orwell
Hunter S Thompson published fifteen books in his lifetime. Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride, 2006
‘Hunter was made for the sixties and early seventies.’ ibid.
Straddling the worlds of journalism and literature, politics, and rock and roll, sports, film, Thompson found himself at the intersection of some interesting times. ibid.
During his senior year of high school Hunter S Thompson was arrested. The charge was armed robbery. ibid.
‘I found the most strange man in America.’ ibid. Ralph Steadman
‘I never thought he’d turn the gun on himself.’ ibid. colleague
August 1806: Jane Austen found herself squeezed alongside her mother, her sister and her lawyer, rushing into Warwickshire in her cousin’s carriage … Jane’s destination … Stoneleigh Abbey … She was thirty years old. Jane Austen: Behind Close Doors, BBC 2017
There wasn’t that much money for luxuries. ibid.
Jane had free access to her father’s library. ibid.
Gore Vidal is America’s greatest living man of letters. For fifty years his essays, letters, stage and screen plays have delighted and shocked his public while his political views have never been less than radical. Omnibus: Gore Vidal: United States of Amnesia I II, BBC 2012
‘There’s not one moment I would like to relive.’ ibid. Gore
Washington: ‘This is a city of the dead … I don’t care to go back.’ ibid. Gore
‘I was no good at being a child. I was a young man for ever.’ ibid.
‘I’ve forgotten practically everything I ever did.’ ibid.
This year’s Booker Prize goes to the most clever author of the year – Martin Aimless. The Comic Strip Presents s5e2: Space Virgins from Planet Sex, Channel 4 1993
It’s Philip Roth’s 80th birthday. And his entire home town of Newark, New Jersey, has turned out to celebrate with him. Roth is considered by many to be America’s greatest living writer, but he hasn’t always been this accessible. Alan Yentob, Imagine … Philip Roth Unleashed I II, BBC 2014
Over 31 books he charted the American century detailing both the political and the personal. ibid.
A series of fictional disguises which have teased his readers. ibid.
1976: Roth moved to London … ‘A Jew clearly without a home.’ ibid.
‘There’s a journalistic side to writing novels because you need the facts, you need the information, you need the details. You have to invent off of something.’ ibid.
Following the acclaim of I Married a Communist, Roth was awarded the national medal of arts by President Clinton. ibid.
‘This past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without you’re thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago. And yet most of the time it’s got no reality; it’s just a set of facts you learned like a lot of stuff in the history books. Then, some chance or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going. And the past doesn’t merely come back to you: you are actually in the past.’ Arena: George Orwell I: Such Were the Joys, BBC 1983
George Orwell: One of the most remarkable figures of twentieth century literature. For Orwell was not one of those writers whose life disappeared into his work; his history is a history of the troubled times in which he lived. ibid.
‘From a very early age, perhaps from the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.’ ibid.
‘He was one of those boys who seemed born old.’ ibid. teacher
‘The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic. They’re merely savage little animals. Except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.’ ibid.
We know almost nothing of his life in Paris. ibid.
By 1933 Eric Blair, now George Orwell, had published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and in London. Arena: George Orwell II: Road to Wigan Pier
‘I don’t think he liked his fellow man at all.’ ibid. Humphrey Dakin, 1971
£500 to write a book about the depressed areas of the north. ibid.
‘He went to Spain because he thought we must fight fascism.’ Arena: George Orwell III: Homage to Catalonia, village neighbour
The civil war in Spain broke out on the 18th July 1936. General Franco’s attack on the beleaguered Spanish republic had angered a great many English intellectuals on the left. ibid.
For Orwell, after his experience in the Spanish Civil War, totalitarianism had become the enemy. He saw the coming war in Europe as a conflict between two distorted ideologies: Nazi fascism and Stalinist communism. Arena: George Orwell IV: The Lion & The Unicorn
‘One must above all die fighting.’ ibid.
‘The goose step for instance is one of the most terrible sights in the world.’ ibid.
28th August: ‘I am now definitely an employee of the BBC.’ ibid.
Orwell was denied any pleasure from the victory celebrations at the end of World War II. He and his wife Eileen had adopted a baby boy Richard but Orwell was separated from them working as a war correspondent when she was suddenly taken into hospital with what appeared to be a routine operation. Arena: George Orwell V: 1984
Isolated and angry in a world of gloom and shortages, Orwell struggled on alone with his adopted son. He sought female companionship with the desperation of the very lonely. ibid.
‘He had quite extensive disease of both lungs.’ ibid. Dr James Williamson
Sometimes I think I wasn’t born but I just came out of an ink blot. Arena: Hilary Mantel: Return to Wolf Hall, BBC 2020
‘It causes me to reflect on different layers of reality – fact, history, myth – how they merge into one.’ ibid.
A slightly tall angular shy but not unconfident Englishman with a hollow cheek look, a rather dolorous look in some ways, a solemn look, but yet it’s not the look of someone with no sense of humour. It’s the look of someone who’s been through quite a lot and has tried his best. But there is a final element of pessimism to it. Christopher Hitchens, lecture Why Orwell Matters, 1981 Commonwealth Club
He was facing that policeman in himself. ibid.
The bullet had gone right through. It had missed his larynx, it had missed his carotid artery, it had missed his spinal chord, and it only grazed his vocal chords. And all of them said the same thing. Can you guess what it was? That was lucky. And he said, If I was lucky, I wouldn’t have got shot in the throat at all. ibid.
He exposed once and for all time the idea of the Stalinist utopia. (Author & Lecture & Literature & Utopia) ibid.
Famous for writing 1984 and inventing Big Brother, George Orwell witnessed and reported on some of the defining moments of the 20th century. But there are no moving pictures of Orwell. Nor are there any recordings of his voice. He did leave a vast written legacy. George Orwell: A Life in Pictures, BBC 2003
George Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair. He was born on 25th June 1903 into what he labelled the lower upper middle class. ibid.
From childhood he had suffered from frequent chest infections. ibid.
Returning to London, Blair sank deeper into the underclass. ibid.
‘He was in a kind of world of his own half the time.’ ibid. family friend
A key piece of The Road to Wigan Pier is Orwell’s trip down a mine. ibid.
The Road to Wigan Pier was an immediate success. ibid.
After four months at the front, Orwell was granted leave to visit Barcelona. ibid.
Orwell and Eileen moved into London just in time for the Blitz. ibid.
His BBC Office was Room 101. ibid.
In 1945 Animal Farm was finally published … a critical triumph and a best-seller. ibid.
‘The execution would have been better if I not been under the influence of TB when I wrote it.’ ibid. Orwell, re 1984