The Crazy Real-Life Story Of 1984 Author George Orwell Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
By S. Flannagan/Jan. 11, 2021 3:08 pm EDT/Updated: Jan. 11, 2021 3:10 pm EDT
There s an old stereotype about novelists that they ll do anything to get new material. In the case of George Orwell, one of the most quoted (and misquoted) authors of the 20th century, this certainly rings true. In fact, the British author had what can only be described as an almost pathological necessity to accumulate experiences through which to understand the world anew.
Born into a moderately wealthy family as Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903, according to Biography, his father worked in the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the cultivation of poppies and the production and export of opium to China on behalf of the British Empire, per the BBC. Orwell s mother, who returned to England with her son and his older sister when he was just a year old, was from a cash-poor aristocratic background. And
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On November 30, the Spanish government announced that it would step in to save the tomb of a longtime
Nation journalist, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who worked as one of the magazine’s editors from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s.
Vayo, as he was generally known, was a socialist politician and diplomat who served as Spain’s foreign minister during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). After Francisco Franco’s victory, he lived in exile in France, the United States where he became a close friend of
The Leader Newspaper
Albatera: from Francoist concentration camp to Visitor Centre
The archaeological investigation finds human remains and the campsite, but does not locate any mass graves.
Hunger, disease, torture and executions characterised the Francoist concentration camp in San Isidro close to Albatera, where 20,000 Republican prisoners were interned for almost seven months, between 6 April 1939 and 27 October of that year, many of them having previously occupied important government positions in the Republic.
There were also members of the military, journalists, trade unionists and artists who were all captured in the port of Alicante when they tried to leave Spain on the British coal ship SS Stanbrook just days before the end of the civil war.