Category George Orwell

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Books, Bret Easton Ellis, DH Lawrence, Fiction, George Orwell, JK Rowling, Jodi Picoult, Khaled Hosseini, Kurt Vonnegut, Ma Jian, Margaret Atwood, Roald Dahl, Rupi Kaur, Sách & Tri thức, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov

Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read

From Instagram poetry to Greek classics, the works of fiction that have caused uproar through history – and into the present

The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.

Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

thanhtoong0
August 23, 2025

Books, Culture, George Orwell, Sách & Tri thức

‘Animal Farm was my parents’ teamwork’: Orwell’s son on 80 years of the satirical classic

Richard Blair on the role his mother played in developing the 1945 political fable – and how it nearly didn’t get published

As the second world war reached its height, the winter of 1943-4 was one of the coldest of the century. My parents were living in a poorly heated flat in Kilburn, north-west London. My mother was working at the Ministry of Food. She was deeply involved in BBC Radio’s Kitchen Front which tried to help people conjure nutritious meals from their rations. My father became literary editor of Tribune magazine in November 1943. He was only required in the office three days a week, which gave him the time to write Animal Farm.

Every evening, my father would read what he’d written to my mother under heavy blankets in bed. It was the only warm place in the flat. They would discuss the developing story and where it might go next. Lettice Cooper, the novelist and my mother’s Ministry of Food colleague, remembered my mother updating them every morning with the animals’ latest adventures. That my father and mother worked together so closely is no surprise. My father respected my mother’s talents greatly and later told a friend she had helped plan Animal Farm.

thanhtoong0
August 17, 2025

Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read

‘Animal Farm was my parents’ teamwork’: Orwell’s son on 80 years of the satirical classic

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