George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was born 25 June 1903 and took the pen name George Orwell to write prose stripped clean and aimed at totalitarianism from every direction. He went north to document working-class life in industrial England for The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), then fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and turned that into Homage to Catalonia (1938). The allegorical novella Animal Farm arrived in 1945, then Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, a year before he died on 21 January 1950. The adjective "Orwellian" now sits permanent in the dictionary, and in 2008 The Times ranked him the seco…