George Orwell stood up for democratic socialism and against totalitarianism. He praised lucid writing and condemned euphemistic language. Many of the phrases with which we analyse politics and culture today — from the concept of Newspeak to the idea of Big Brother — come from Orwell. He is like a guiding saint, an avatar of moral and intellectual clarity. But the writer Anna Funder, in her new book Wifedom, argues that Orwell possessed a complicating streak of bigotry.
Orwell was “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent and also brilliant,” Funder argued when she spoke recently at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. The “also brilliant” was cut off from a newspaper headline about her talk, and many people online saw that headline in a post and responded by saying something along the lines of ‘the media is now trying to cancel Orwell’.
