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.
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.
‘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.
122,253. With an advance from his publisher, he settled down to try to write … ‘She [wife] was very pretty. Very intelligent. Very philosophical. Awfully good company.’ 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 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
‘I think you’re allowed to not always know what it means.’ Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Howard Jacobson
‘Ulysses takes place over just one day and night in Dublin.’ ibid. dude
‘Nothing happens. A man walks around Dublin.’ ibid. Salman Rushdie
‘He paradoxically achieves a kind of heroism.’ ibid. dude
When Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922 it changed modern writing for ever. With its arcane references to Homer’s Odyssey and a bewildering variety of styles, it was anti-Catholic, sexually explicit and banned in Britain and America. 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
Many writers in history have fallen foul of power. But only one became a legend. Exactly 2,000 years ago in A.D. 17 the most famous poet in Rome died here in exile on the shores of the Black Sea. Ovid: The Poet & The Emperor, BBC 2019
Ovid is one of the world’s greatest poets, one of the immortals … The most influential works in European literature. ibid.
He writes a book of imaginary letters from literary heroines. ibid.
The Art of Love is published here in Rome in the immediate aftermath of a sensational sex scandal which embarrassingly involved the emperor himself … The timing couldn’t have been worse. ibid.
The Book of Changes: it was six years in the writing and it’s one of the world’s great poems. ibid.
The Metamorphosis fascinated Shakespeare and his contemporaries. ibid.
He is also being subversive. ibid.
A poet who lived 2,000 years ago but whose words still have the power to move us over that great gap of time. ibid.
30 years ago a book was published that lit a fire across the country. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie sparked a culture war between Muslims who believed they were defending the honour of their prophet and the fundamental right of free speech. The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On, BBC 2019
In the interval between Miami and Chicago I read Myra Breckinridge [Gore Vidal]. It attempts heuristic allegory but fails, giving gratification only to sadist homosexuals and challenge only to taxonomists of perversion. I thought and thought about it. There is nothing left to say about Myra. Bill Buckley, cited Best of Enemies ***** 2015
Sirens screaming, a warrior driven by revenge, a sun in search of a father, and the trickiest journey home you could ever imagine. This, ladies and gentlemen, is not some twentieth-century urban rhyme, it’s one of the greatest stories ever told. Homer’s Odyssey has been ricocheting around the world for thousands of years. Akala’s Odyssey, BBC 2019
The central theme of the Odyssey is the irresistible urge to return home. ibid.
‘We have the name, we have the poems, and we have lots of stories from Antiquities.’ ibid. Professor Barbara Graziosi, Durham University
The Greeks actually believed the Odyssey took place. ibid.