In the second, he described Blair as “a great tragic figure” whose credibility was “vanishing”. Writing in 1944 about the Home Guard, where he had been a diligent member, Orwell stresses the themes comically utilised in Dad’s Army: “Its tendency has been to fall into the accepted English class patterns.” It is depressing to consider the decline in public involvement since the 1945 election, when the prevailing attitude among electors was “serious and democratic and gives evidence of a great advance in political intelligence”. In 1945, 10 years before the Dien Bien Phu debacle, Orwell noted how De Gaulle’s intention to retain Indochina as a colony was a consequence of revived French nationalism stemming from defeat. From 1942 until his death seven years later, Orwell contributed foreign reports, features and book reviews to the great liberal paper of the era.Orwell’s pieces, which flowed effortlessly from his typewriter after he first tried them out on colleagues in the form of monologues fuelled by “strong tea and hand-rolled cigarettes of strong shag”, are remarkable for both perceptiveness and prescience. hough this collection lacks anything to compare with Orwell’s celebrated essays on such quirky topics as Billy Bunter, the perfect pub and Donald McGill’s seaside postcards, it is an absorbing haul that reflects a fascinating period

The Observer Years by George Orwell (ATLANTIC £12 (242pp))
Though this collection lacks anything to compare with Orwell’s celebrated essays on such quirky topics as Billy Bunter, the perfect pub and Donald McGill’s seaside postcards, it is an absorbing haul that reflects a fascinating period. Walker Books, whose much-loved kids’ characters include Maisie and Wally, will publish in the spring the first-ever picture-book version of Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ 1968 animated movie.. “Scud Stud” Rageh Omaar and Joanne Harris are the bookends for the Festival.

Mslexia subscriptions: 0191-261 6656.* The Essex Book Festival, now in its sixth year, brings together a formidable line-up of talent across the county, which boasts 300 reading groups. Many of the 40-plus writers in the programme, which runs throughout March, have local connections: Martina Cole is an Essex Girl and proud of it; so too Lesley Pearce and Barbara Erskine. With Sylvia about to open, reading them might offer an antidote to Gwyneth Paltrow-induced visions (above) of gifted women poets as stricken, suicidal and – preferably – long dead. It features a lavish helping of liberal history alongside predictable fare, as well as a selection of well-thumbed secondhand books from the bibliophile senator’s own library. Apparently, tourists are flocking in to discuss the state of the nation with the proprietor, who is frequently to be found in the shop.

It’s 32 years since George McGovern, the presidential candidate who promised to end the Vietnam War at all costs, was defeated by Richard Nixon after an election campaign that bequeathed us the Watergate tapes. So why not buck the trend and explore the Top 10 of new women poets featured in Mslexia, the magazine “for women who write”? A panel of poets and editors came up with a list notable for its “confidence and authority”: Kate Clanchy; Polly Clark; Gwyneth Lewis; Alice Oswald; Pascale Petit; Derryn Rees-Jones; Catherine Smith; Jean Sprackland; Greta Stoddart; Jackie Wills. McGovern’s has opened its doors on Main Street in Stevensville, Montana, a town of 2,000 souls near Missoula The store is run by his grandson, Tim Mead. Now, with the 2004 campaign in full swing, McGovern – former Second World War bomber pilot and UN Ambassador who represented South Dakota in the Senate – is back As a bookseller. One day there will be a Coppard revival, and it will start with Dusky Ruth’s centrepiece, “The Higgler”, 30 sparsely written pages about a rural love affair that might have been, and one of the best short stories in the language.
DJ Taylor’s life of Orwell has won the Whitbread Biography Award. The two “rural writers” to whom he is most often compared are Hardy and HE Bates, but he has none of the former’s cosmic vengeance or the latter’s sentimentality. Though any amount of bad things happen, none is strictly classifiable as tragedy: Coppard’s philosophy is a shoulder-shrugging, sympathetic “That’s how it is”.

Doris Lessing, who met him 50 years ago, noted “a sparrow’s eye view, sharp, wry, surviving, and not one who can quarrel with the savage economies of the field of the hedgerow”. Coppard (1878 – 1957) was one of those tenacious autodidacts who arrive at a career in literature through a kind of intuition and whose grasp on the human situations that catch their interest is wholly unforced. Besides, as O’Hara notes, “We believe stories in the papers about how little trusted journalists are… Go figure.” Post-Hutton, let this tricky, timely book help with your figuring.. I bought my Penguin paperback of this “best of” selection in Blackwell’s, Oxford, in 1980: 19 stories culled from half-a-dozen collections published in the Twenties. It would have my beauty and your brains.” The great dramatist replied that it might easily turn out the other way around.Still, I savoured, enjoyed and admired O’Hara’s scattergun scepticism about the “trust” debate, far more so than the watertight solemnities of O’Neill Which matters in this area, where paradox abounds.