Perhaps Orwell’s affair with Inez was cooling, because she too writes him into an unlikeable character, ‘the survivor of an awful prep school where the boys were all “snob-brats”, using a tinder-lighter acquired while fighting in Spain, recovering from a wound in a squalid Paris hospital . . . and working in filthy hotel kitchens’. Orwell was not amused. Worse, it was for a radio story he’d commissioned from her.
