George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari in the Indian state of Bihar. His father Richard was a minor official in the Opium Department, which regulated the growing of opium and its export to China; his mother Ida had grown up in Burma. In 1904 she settled with the children in Henley-on-Thames. The family belonged to the colonial middle class: status without wealth.

At eight he went to St Cyprian's boarding school in Eastbourne, about which he later wrote the bitter essay 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. A scholarship took him to Eton in 1917, where Aldous Huxley briefly taught him French. His results were too modest for a university scholarship, and in 1922, aged nineteen, he left for Burma, where as a police officer he became responsible for districts with up to two hundred thousand inhabitants.

Orwell wrote from what he had seen for himself. He washed dishes in Paris hotels, slept in London lodging houses and went down the mines of Lancashire to describe how poverty works. In Spain he ended up more or less by chance in the militia of the POUM, a small anti-Stalinist Marxist party; in May 1937 he lived through the street fighting between Communists and anarchists in Barcelona and saw his comrades persecuted as 'fascists'.

That experience determined his later work. He continued to call himself a democratic socialist, but turned against every form of totalitarianism and against the lie as a political instrument. 'Animal Farm' tells the Russian Revolution as an animal fable; 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' describes a state that rewrites the past and narrows language to make thought impossible. In essays such as 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) he linked clear writing to honest thinking.

Orwell came of age in the British Empire at its greatest extent and watched it decay from the inside. The 1930s brought mass unemployment in Britain's industrial regions, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and the show trials in Moscow. Many left-wing intellectuals saw the Soviet Union as the only bulwark against fascism and did not want to hear criticism of Stalin.

During the Second World War the Soviet Union was an ally, which made the publication of 'Animal Farm' difficult in 1944: four publishers turned it down. Then the Cold War began, a term Orwell himself was one of the first to use, in 1945. Propaganda, radio and secret services grew in those years to a scale that fed his picture of the future.

'Homage to Catalonia' sold badly when it appeared in 1938, but later came to be regarded as one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War and of the suppression of the revolutionary left in Barcelona. 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' became bestsellers at once and have since sold tens of millions of copies.

During the Cold War both books were distributed by Western governments as anti-communist reading and were banned in the Eastern bloc, where they circulated in secret. Orwell himself stressed that he was attacking not socialism but dictatorship. His words and images are used today in debates about state surveillance, propaganda and disinformation, by people of very different political persuasions.

Orwell had had weak lungs for years and was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1947. He finished 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' in 1948 in a remote farmhouse on Jura and was then admitted to hospital. On 13 October 1949 he married Sonia Brownell in hospital; on 21 January 1950 he died, aged 46, of a haemorrhage of the lung. He is buried at Sutton Courtenay under his own name, Eric Arthur Blair.

After his death his reputation grew quickly. Admirers praise his independence and his style; critics point to his prejudices, to the roles of women in his novels and to the list of 38 names of people he considered unsuitable for anti-communist information work, which he gave to the Information Research Department in 1949 and which was made public in 2003. Defenders see it as advice, opponents as informing.