What George Orwell’s garden reveals about his politics of resistance

In tending to his roses, Orwell created a refuge from industrial capitalism, fascism and war.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for The New Statesman

(Illustration by Rebecca Hendin)

‘“I’m not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood,” George Orwell wrote in 1946. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

Like many educated in the British system in the second half of the 20th century, the world-view I acquired in childhood owed a great deal to George Orwell.’

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