My Country Right or Left 1940-1943: The Collected Essays Journalism & Letters of George Orwell (Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell)
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell. Read by Philip Glenister CSA Word £16.16 6hrs The year of Orwell's dystopia is now long past, but it's frightening to realise just how much of it has come true. The novel, with those dreadful child spies busy reporting their parents to the Thought Police, and Big Brother's telescreens, is given fresh life through this vigorous narration. The Death of Bunny...
Should dead languages be resurrected in our primary schools? Some of the great minds of English literature have advised against it. George Orwell doubted "whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment". William Hazlitt said: "Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool...
The ebook reader may have advantages over unwieldy printed tomes, but it has unexpected drawbacks CHRISTMAS IS coming and you're wondering what to put on your wish list. How about an Amazon Kindle – the gizmo that enables you to download books, magazines and newspapers and read them on the move? According to the publicity blurb, this cool device "can hold 1,500 books and be read for up...
This month Wendy supplied us with a list of first lines and asks which books we’ve read and which would make it to our tbr list on the basis of the first line. Bold = the books I’ve read Pink = tbr pile 1. Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Jane Austen, Pride...
Holy ai caramba! First Gordon Brown and now China. My late communist Dad must be spinning at the news that UK Chinese ambassador Madam Fu Ying has declared herself a fan of The X Factor . Never mind China and human rights, what about Simon Cowell's crimes against humanity? According to The Independent report: 'She praised twins John and Edward's "determination and spirit in the face of a lot of...
The Nobel Peace Prize was given to a man who, like a character in a George Orwell novel, kills in the name of peace. And as much as his doublespeak would like to drown out the cries of the victims of the sinister cadre of human rights abusers and war criminals that he supports, anyone with an elementary knowledge of current events knows that Obama’s hands are muddied by the muck his allies have...
Message to any Democrat, Republican, or Independent lawmaker who is thinking of abolishing or weakening the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. As a convicted felon, who committed his crimes in cold blood and with callous disregard for my victims, I will publicly endorse each and every one of you as a champion of the white collar criminal class that are a cancer on our great capitalist economic system. According...
As everyone knows .... most people know? ... Okay, the few who voted know, last Tuesday was local election day around the country, and as part of their coverage of the Iowa City elections, the Iowa City Press-Citizen ran a profile on election official Tom Slockett titled " What I'm Into ." To quote from the section dealing with Slockett's book preferences: "I like a variety. I don't...
"Some wind in the morning, then nice sunny weather. Ground has dried up somewhat. In the evening violent wind & a few drops of rain. The wind actually blew the roof off the small henhouse. Enormous flocks of starlings, some tens of thousands at a time, going over with a noise that sounds like heavy rain. The leaves are mostly down now. Elder leaves just coming down. As I remember it the elms...
One of my favourite TV correspondents is John Stossel. I find his reporting is consistently forthright, provocative, challenging to axiomatic ideas and both well presented and well researched. In short, what good journalism ought to be. Stossel has recently changed networks, switching from the politically accepted ABC to the unfashionable (read right of center) Fox. Here is his take on the situation....
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner [...]
By Trevor Johnson Subliminal perception was used in the 1920s on British radio stations. Radio was a new concept and many people took it as being sinister, so BBC started putting subliminal messages in its jingles. Even the book 1984, by George Orwell, mentions the use of subliminal ideas. Stores put messages in their music being piped through the building, to discourage theft. Cartoons also supply...
A very wise man once said " that if you can control the past, you can control the present and the future." I have always wondered what this meant since the first time I read "1984" when I was 17, surprisingly enough in 1984. In the novel, the history books, newspapers and all records are changed to take account of the change in current circumstances. It is all dependent on the whim...
I found myself last night watching a pathetic and dissembling William Hague defending David Cameron's decision to now not have a national referendum on the British government's ratification of the EU Lisbon Treaty, which was signed in a closed unphotographed room by Gordon Brown a few months ago. The moment I realised what Cameron had done was the moment I finally lost all and any hope for the Conservative...
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s frightening vision of the future, (albeit a future that passed us by more than 25 years ago now), everything was monitored, surveillance was prevalent and freedom quashed. Well I was given a demonstration of it today (not much freedom quashing to be fair) and I got to tell you it [...]
Big Brother Tv Reality Show Big Brother refers to the George Orwell book titled 1984, in which government knows everything about you and what you happen to be up to. The concept made its leap to the television airwaves when a Dutch producer came up wit...
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