Publisher's Synopsis
Over 70 years since his death, George Orwell - author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, essayist and activist journalist of the left - remains one of the most significant and popular writers of the last century. Here, in a collection of recent original, entertaining and often controversial essays, Richard Lance Keeble throws new insights on Orwell - the man, his writings, his life and his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Topics include:
- the politics of dress and undress,
- representations of fatherhood,
- advertisements and the political economy of the media,
- Orwell and Evelyn Waugh,
- his surprising, life-long love of D. H. Lawrence's writings,
- the importance and delight of the domestic diaries,
- Orwell and the theatre,
- how Eileen saved his life during 1938 flu epidemic,
- Eton and the 'invisible masonic network of support'.
Richard Lance Keeble is one of our leading authorities on George Orwell. Everything he writes is essential reading for anyone interested in the man, his writings and his times. The essays collected in this volume are insightful, informative and often entertaining as well, a rare combination.
John Newsinger, author of Hope Lies in the Proles
Once again Prof. Keeble has come up with some fascinating insights
into the world of George Orwell.
Richard Blair, Patron of The Orwell Society
Keeble has skilfully broadened our appreciation of Orwell's wide-ranging interests, along with delightful eccentricities, that other scholars have traditionally glossed over.
Sylvia Topp, author of Eileen: The Making of George Orwell
Orwell's Moustache confirms Richard Keeble's reputation as one of Orwell's most acute and knowledgeable readers, reinventing for the twenty-first century a man we think we know: the always compelling, always contradictory figure of George Orwell whose passions, obsessions, strengths and secrets here assume new meanings through analysis of everything from Orwell's dress to his father, his wife, his jokes, his diet, his fishing, and of course, his writing and politics.
Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University, NJ
A brilliant and consistently original assortment of responses to the always surprising complexity of Orwell's obsessions, familiar and unfamiliar - from his love of fishing, to his enduring concern with the politics of food, to the delights of recording small things in small ways in small diary entries, and much more besides. This is imaginative and in the best sense sympathetic criticism written by one of today's leading Orwell scholars.
Nathan Waddell, University of Birmingham
