George Orwell began keeping a diary on August 9 1938. The habit never left him, and some of his last scrawled notes are details from the daily routine of the Gloucestershire sanatorium in which he spent the first eight months of 1949, prior to his death at University College Hospital in January 1950. Every day for the foreseeable future, the Orwell Prize website (theorwellprize.co.uk) will be printing a 70 year-old entry as an Orwell blog. The diaries are not unpublished - they first saw the light in Peter Davison's monumental 20-volume Orwell: The Complete Works (1998) - but this is their first exposure to any kind of mass audience.
The year 1938 marked a pivotal point in Orwell's career. His time in Spain, where he had fought on the republican side, had not only left him with a bullethole in his throat, but further undermined his already weakened lungs. In March, shortly before publication of Homage to Catalonia, his spilling of the leftwing Spanish beans, he suffered a life-threatening haemorrhage, and though protesting - rather in the manner of the dying DH Lawrence - that "I don't think there's very much wrong with me" was hastily removed to a sanatorium at Aylesford in Kent. He remained there for the next five months. Towards the end of his stay, as his health improved, he was transferred to the sanatorium's annexe, where the first diary entries were compiled.
The gap between the wider world and the immediate view from "New Hostel, Preston Hall, Aylesford, Kent" is rather marked. Europe was sliding towards war - Orwell's own political views in the run-up to Munich were those of an extreme pacifist - but the first "domestic diary" entries display his nature-loving, "English" and occasionally faintly wistful side. The first entry records his capture of a snake in the herbaceous border and a solemn recapitulation of its markings ("Not certain whether an adder, as these I think usually have a sort of broad arrow mark all down the back"). Two days later he is noting a "curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently result of moisture acting on lacquer" and the first crop of Beauty of Bath apples.
Come early September, subsidised by a loan of £300 from an anonymous benefactor (in fact the novelist LH Myers), Orwell and his wife Eileen set off for French Morocco, where it was thought that the climate might help his ravaged lungs. Here the diary splits in two - a more political variant muses on such topics as the ideological slant of the Marrakech newspapers, while the domestic original continues with its notes on animal husbandry, its absorption in the tools of the Jewish tailors, its sympathy for starving dogs and dead donkeys flung into ditches and its apparent indifference to the state of the writer's health. "Have been ill (chest) since 16th" runs a terse entry from November 23 1938. (Eileen, writing to a friend, declared that he had "been worse here than I've ever seen him".) Oddly, it is the nature notes that seem to provide a more obvious clue to the kind of person Orwell was and the way he went about his life. In the end, the man who noted that "cold tea is good fertiliser for geraniums" is revealing quite as much of himself as the keen-eyed student of the Tangier graffiti.
DJ Taylor
We've had books promoted by movies before - Notting Hill ends with Julia Roberts's head and a copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (then about to be filmed by the same production company) sharing Hugh Grant's lap. Now, though, there's one that owes its existence to a film. A collection called Love Letters of Great Men appears in the Sex and the City movie, even though there was no such a book. Such was fans' enthusiasm that the similarly titled Love Letters of Great Men and Women, published in 1924, rose through Amazon's sales rankings spectacularly.
Love Letters of Great Men will soon be in the shops, however, after being speedily assembled by the former Picador editor Ursula Doyle for Macmillan. Dominated by giants of literature (Pope, Burns, Byron, Keats, Balzac, Flaubert, Wilde, etc), it also features composers, soldiers, scientists and statesmen (needy letters Napoleon may well have regretted sending to Josephine); all out of copyright, of course, which means anyone looking for, say Arthur Miller's letters to Marilyn Monroe, or Nicolas Sarkozy's emails to Carla Bruni, will be disappointed. Perhaps thanks to Doyle, the anthology has a subtext probably lacking in its 1920s forerunner: "there is a case for calling this book 'Great Men - going on about themselves since AD61'", she writes in her preface. "Certainly some of those here would have benefited from being taken aside and gently told: it's not All About You."
John Dugdale
"I wonder if other readers are finding it as enjoyable as I do to use Google Earth in conjunction with the books they're reading," runs a letter from an Arkansas reader in the current New York Times Book Review. "What I mean is to be reading about, say, the Fifth Precinct and 27 Eldridge Street [in New York] in Richard Price's Lush Life, and then to fly there and poke around in Google Earth."
But the internet can do much better than that, or so it's claimed: it is beginning to be used to transport readers into the imagined spaces of classic fiction. The blurb for Stepping into Virtual Worlds, a one-day conference taking place on Monday (and again, rather bafflingly, on Wednesday), asks: "What if we could actually visit the locations we read about? What if we could hear Lincoln or Shakespeare speak?"
The conference (steppingintovirtualworlds.org) takes place entirely in the virtual world of Second Life, and besides discussions - such as how building immersive 3D worlds based on books can enhance the experience of literature - promises "field trips into literature-based locations" that have been created there: "participants may find themselves in an Edgar Allan Poe poem, or learning about gothic literature in an authentically spooky gothic mansion, and could even fall down a rabbit hole!"
JD
