Glenn Burgess

Aug 14, 2024 | theguardian.com | Glenn Burgess

The horrors of plantation slavery are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary retellings of the past, as portrayed in film or taught in schools and universities; a feature of our vivid but sometimes too simplistic understanding of empire and its evils.

Sep 27, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | D.J. Taylor |Glenn Burgess |Anna Funder |Colin Burrow

What​ a difference six inches can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head. If that had happened, what would the world think of him now? We wouldn’t have the word ‘Orwellian’ in the OED’s sense, ‘characteristic or suggestive of the writings of George Orwell, esp.