George Orwell: English Rebel

Who am I? I grew up on the north-western fringe of Europe. I went to an elite school that made me acutely aware of how different I was from boys from richer or more aristocratic families. My upbringing left me with the instincts of an outsider and the confidence of an insider. Like many a French intellectual, I managed to build a career as a journalist and author on this paradox. Like many German writers of my generation, I thought a lot about mass communication, propaganda and group psychology. Faced with the ideological crises of the 1930s, I joined men from Belgium, Hungary and Czechoslovakia fighting on the side of the republic in the Spanish Civil War. The experience made me profoundly distrustful of communists. The books for which I am now known best are works of fiction exploring the evils of totalitarianism.

The answer, of course, is George Orwell.

Orwell’s is the story of a 20th-century European intellectual as well as the story of an ‘English rebel’, as Robert Colls styles him. Nevertheless, while the big questions of the 1930s and 1940s cut across national borders, Orwell answered them with an English accent. And, as time went on, believing in England became important to him.


http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/10/george-orwell-english-rebel