"Some people now say that the Orwell of 'As I Please' would have been an avid blogger, but I'm not so sure. Certainly, his advice to would-be writers should be set in stone in the hallways of news organisations the world over:
'A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.'
One of the things I love about Orwell is that throughout the painful and ceaseless endeavour of his final years, he combined a fierce, even majestic, idealism with a modest and painful sense of his own fragility.
'If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?' he once asked. 'Almost certainly you are both.' When you work on a newspaper, and write a blog, you can't help knowing what he was talking about."
Why it's hard to conjure the spirit of Orwell |guardian.co.uk- continue reading "
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