Though he worked for the BBC for two and a half years and often spoke on air, no recording of George Orwell’s voice has been found. Many friends and memoirists have described it, and his struggles to make himself audible (all the more so after a sniper’s bullet went through his throat in Spain), but their accounts vary: was his voice high-pitched or husky, old Etonian or a Cockney drawl? DJ Taylor settles for calling it deadpan, but its elusiveness seems apt.
Orwell was one of the great voices of the 20th century. But the voice of the early novels isn’t the voice of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. And the voice of the reporter, down and out among Kentish hop-pickers or Grimethorpe miners, isn’t the voice of Tribune’s “As I Please” columnist. As Taylor rightly says, Orwell remains an indispensable reference point today, whether the topic is CCTV, ID cards, cancel culture or Ukraine.
