Orwell at the BBC, and Other News

It was all the rage! On the eighteenth-century literary vogue for suicides.
“It’s pretty much all hopeless,” and other advice on writing a memoir. (Personally, I would say: throw in a few recipes.)
1984 has never been dramatized by BBC Radio 4 before now. Why? Maybe this has something to do with it: “Orwell partly based the book’s torture area, Room 101, on a meeting room in the building he remembered from his time at the BBC.”
“The day will come when there’ll be private publishing houses in the Soviet Union.” A previously unpublished interview with Joseph Brodsky.