Churchill and Orwell

by Thomas E. Ricks

Evelyn Waugh, possibly the only person to prefer Churchill’s malignant, alcoholic son Randolph Churchill to Churchill himself, would mock Churchill as “a master of sham-Augustan prose.”

It is difficult now to invoke how this novel of the British in Burma must have felt like a slap in the face to those middle-class Englishmen who ran the everyday affairs of the British Empire.

What?

Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell lamenting “the inevitable end of civilization.” Three years later, she would kill herself.

Another thing to blame on Neville Chamberlain !

Hand grenades, he noted, are “easier to throw downstairs than up.” And bullets have a habit of ricocheting along walls, he warned.

We don’t want to see lynching begin in England. I can’t bear the typical Southern attitude toward the negroes. It is a great ulcer on the American civilisation

A favourite saying nowadays is that whereas Chamberlain appeased Germany, Churchill appeases America.”

for few great writers produced as many bad works as he did.