Hands down, references to Orwell and two of his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, outnumber any other literary references on this board, as I believe is true of just about every other contemporary medium in North America, probably in Britain too.

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The Italian raised his head and said quickly: "Italiano?"

I answered in my bad Spanish: "No, Ingles. Y tu?"

"Italiano"

As we went out, he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily suceeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy.

I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him, I must not see him again; and needless to say, I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.

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He sure did die young, but what an influence he had. Certainly a keen observer of the human condition, and still as relevant as he ever was.

He adopted the pen name before the publication of his first book, Road to Wigan Pier, I believe.

Edited to add:

I love the way Eagleton begins his review essay:

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He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself. From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy. Coruscatingly intelligent though not in the strict sense an intellectual, he had the ornery, bloody-minded streak of the independent leftist and idiosyncratic Englishman, as adept at ruffling the feathers of his fellow socialists as at outraging the opposition. As he grew older, this cussedness became more pronounced, until his hatred of benighted autocratic states led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether.

Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his life, and began to earn serious money from his writing only when he was approaching death. This is not the case with Hitchens, unless Vanity Fair is a lot meaner than one imagines.

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[ 25 June 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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Originally posted by Michelle:
Who is Eric?

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Originally posted by paxamillion:

Eric the halibut, of course.

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Half a bee, philosophically, must, ipso facto, half not be.
But half the bee
has got to be,
vis a vis
its entity - do you see?

But can a bee
be said to be
or not to be
an entire bee
when half the bee
is not a bee
due to some ancient injury?

Singing...

La dee dee, 1 2 3,
Eric the half a bee.
A B C D E F G,
Eric the half a bee.

Is this wretched demi-bee,
half asleep upon my knee,
some freak from a menagerie?
No! It's Eric the half a bee.

Fiddle dee dum,
Fiddle dee dee,
Eric the half bee.

Ho ho ho,
Tee hee hee,
Eric the half a bee.

I love this hive employee-ee-ee [with buzzing in background]
bisected accidentally
one summer afternoon by me
I love him carnally.

He loves him carnally... [together]
...semi-carnally

[spoken]

The end

"Cyril Connelly?"
No! "Semi-carnally"
Oh!

Cyril Connelly [sung softly and slowly]

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CNN Europe, June 25

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"Privacy is being systematically engineered into extinction. Each day sees a new onslaught on this precious and delicate right," Simon Davies, director of Privacy International said.

"Within a short time anxious citizens will be reluctantly forced to take action through campaigns of civil disobedience, sabotage or subversion," he said.

In the UK, more than £300 million ($450 million) is spent each year on a surveillance industry involving an estimated 300,000 cameras covering shopping areas, housing estates, car parks and public facilities.

Under recent UK Home Office proposals, state officials will be able to monitor when you are online, who you e-mail and which Web sites you visit, as well as everything you hear and say on the telephone.

Last week, UK Transport Secretary Alistair Darling proposed every car should be fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS), which can pinpoint -- using triangulation -- the position of a car within five or 10 meters.

Mobile phone companies are already able to track users -- more than 80 percent of the UK population -- to within a few feet in urban areas when they make a phone call or text.

Last month, UK Home Secretary David Blunkett proposed a controversial ID card which will hold personal details as well as biometric information like electronic fingerprints.

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As for surveillance in Britain, it's appalling.

From the Sense of the Absurd department: the city government of Barcelona decided, within the last few years, to name a city square after Orwell. They also decided that it would make an ideal location for... yes, a surveillance-camera pilot project.

Edited to add:

Here's a link.

[ 25 June 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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the city government of Barcelona decided, within the last few years, to name a city square after Orwell.

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Me 10/12, but I was doing a fair amount of guessing there, based on knowledge of things English and publishing.