I was in Waterstone’s Bookshop in London’sCrouch End at the weekend. An excellent chain of bookshops. And Crouch End/Alexandra Palace and environs has perhaps the highest concentration of high-profile writers, broadcasters, TV commentators, and other media people in the Anglophone world. BBC Television.was launched from Alexandra Palace in the 1930s and down the hill, which intersects with the bottom of Muswell Hill, is the site of the dwelling “Lalla Rookh” named by the writer of the book of that name – Thomas Moore, bosom friend of Lord Byron, and his executor, and celebrated for THE MINSTREL BOY and numerous other verses, lived there.
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Moore had two volumes of Byron’s Diaries published by John Murray II ( there were 7 John Murrays, fathers and sons to head the
firm.) But as Byron was supposedly “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Murray and his employees, against Moore’s protests
tore up and burned the rest of the diaries. They were afraid of the British public. Lord Macaulay said of the affair- “We know of no
spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
As it happens I have among my heirlooms probably a first edition of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (Byron, of course) and one of Four Volumes of a History of Ireland published in the early 1830s, by Moore, described as by the Royal Irish Academy “as a strongly partisan nationalist work.” It was highly complimentary to Brian Boru, son of Kennedy, and other clansmen of mine and I have no fault to find with it. My maternal grandfather, a Dublin master bookbinder, collected books going back to the 1640s at least. I still have a few of them. I recently bought locally a copy of Lalla Rookh, dated 1820.
Anyhow, Waterstone’s in Crouch End is well-stocked.. With many good books but also with stinkers by the likes of Boris Johnson
and Jacob Rees Mogg. Books about Churchill, including by the late (Lord) Roy Jenkins, who maintained (while still, otherwise in his right mind) that the old blackguard had brought peace to Ireland. Jenkins, a cultured intellectual, got such a swollen head that he came behind Screaming Lord Sutch in a Parliamentary election.
There are perhaps worse fates for cultured and brilliant men who develop swollen heads, as did a former hero, and fellow-traveller
of mine, on his 90th Birthday in 1997. A cocaine-snorting twerp in THE TIMES hailed him as “THE GREATEST LIVING IRISHMAN”
Anyhow, before earning the plaudits of Michael Gove, Conor Cruise O’Brien, in one of his essays, described George Orwell as
a conservative writer. Before I read a word of Orwell I heard a conservative (but worthy teacher priest) quote the line about
“everybody being equal, but some more equal than others” from “1984” , a book, then, and many years later, banned in
Ireland. When I read it I thought it might well have been a satire on the Catholic Church, an institution Orwell was not enamoured
of. A prime villain in the book was named O’Brien.
It is the Seventieth Anniversary of the publication of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and the bookshops are cashing-in on it. Orwell is favoured by conservatives with a small “c” and a big “C” and, indeed by rabid-reactionaries. Considering his connection with
“Tribune” this is, on the face of it, strange. For the late Michael Foot, who once edited Tribune, is being libelled in THE TIMES,
as a Soviet agent and traitor to his country, and a frequent visitor to the USSR. When still living, THE SUNDAY TIMES published the same libel on Foot and had to pay damages. According to PRIVATE EYE, Foot visited the USSR only twice, once in 1937 and next in 1971.
THE TIMES was never noted for intestinal fortitude nor a pedantic attachment to facts. I understand that in his hatred of Communism Orwell became a British version of Senator Joe McCarthy, denouncing those he thought unsound. Could HE have first peddled the lies put out by THE TIMES?
I have four volumes of The Collected Essays & Journalism of Orwell, covering the years 1920-1950, which I picked up for
a snip over thirty years ago. Some of it condemns imperialism – the subjection of mainly darker-skinned people to white-skinned ones and the robbery of their lands, and the cruelty it entailed. Some of condemns capitalism, the class system, the poverty of workers, such as coalminers, whose blood, toil, tears and sweat sustain the undeserving rich.The collection covers about two thousand pages, none of which suggest that Orwell had any sense of humour. (In this he is matched by D.H. Lawrence.
Some of the journalism (how much I don’t know) has been reproduced in pamphlet-length form.It seems there is no intention of reprinting the complete works in the old format. It would not surprise me if his hardest hitting anti-Imperialist and anti-capitalist essays have been “redacted.”
I can’t recall any books being published to celebrate the seventieth anniversary, or any Anniversary of the founding of THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS. Nor have I heard rumours of any prepared for its centenary.
I believe that whilst Britain and France signed the League’s Covenant, neither had any intention of honouring it. They had bribed Italy into joining in their war, by offering them, at Austria’s expense, the Dolomite Region, including Trieste, but reneged. This helped Mussolini to power.The British and French later backed his rape of Abyssinia, the British exacting Suez Canal tolls on the rapists.
No wonder the centenary of the League of Nations is Ignored by those whose predecessors ratted on their obligations to it..
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