ORWELL: A MAN OF OUR TIME
Book ID/图书代码： 02000020C00027
English Summary/英文概要： As one of the most enduringly popular and controversial novelists of the last century, the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death in 2020 will certainly be marked by conferences, festivals and media events - but more significant than these acts of commemoration is his relevance today.
Despite the commonplace view that Animal Farm was aimed exclusively at Stalinist Russia, it was far more broadly focussed and the similarities between aspects of the novel and Trump’s America are obvious. `Not only the parallels with the current President, but also by those who feel that his cult of personality is a mandate for collective nastiness. ’Doublethink’ features in Nineteen Eighty Four and it is the forerunner to ’Fake News’.
Aside from Orwell’s importance as a political theorist and novelist his life in its own right is a beguiling narrative. His family was caught between upper middle-class complacency and uncertainty, and Orwell’s time at Prep School and as a scholarship boy at Eton caused him to despise the class system that spawned him despite finding himself unable to fully detach himself from it.
His life thereafter mirrored the history of his country; like many from his background he devoted himself to socialism as a salve to his conscience. He died at the point when Britain’s status as an Imperial and world power had waned.
An interest in him endures, principally because it is difficult to differentiate between the man who recorded the terrible events of the depression and the Spanish Civil War as an observer and the fiction writer who used literature to predict grim possibilities and diagnose horribly endemic inclinations. No other British writer of the 20th century has blended ideas, political commentary and literary art in such a manner.
For an author whose work has been regarded as the most important in terms of the turbulent years of the mid-20th century and who eroded the boundaries between literature, journalism and political commentary, there have been relatively few attempts to present a vibrant portrait of the man behind the writings. Fifteen years (closer to eighteen when this book appears) is a long time for the absence of a life of one of one of the best-known authors of the twentieth century.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 作为上个世纪最受欢迎和最具争议的小说家之一，2020年乔治•奥威尔逝世70周年肯定会举行各种会议、节日和媒体活动——但比这些纪念活动更重要的是他与今天的关系。
尽管人们普遍认为《动物庄园》只是针对斯大林主义的俄罗斯，但它的着眼点要广泛得多，而且小说与特朗普笔下的美国在某些方面有明显的相似之处。这不仅是因为他与现任总统有相似之处，还因为有些人认为他对个人的崇拜是对集体肮脏行为的授权。“双重思想”在1984年出现，它是“假新闻”的前身。
除了作为一个政治理论家和小说家的重要性，奥威尔的生活本身就是一个令人迷惑的叙述。他的家庭夹在中上层阶级的自满和不确定之间，奥威尔在预科学校和伊顿公学的奖学金获得者的经历让他鄙视孕育他的阶级制度，尽管他发现自己无法完全脱离它。
此后，他的生活反映了他的国家的历史;像许多他这样背景的人一样，他献身于社会主义，作为良心的慰藉。他去世时，英国作为帝国和世界强国的地位已经衰退。
人们对他的兴趣经久不衰，主要是因为很难区分他是一个以观察者的身份记录大萧条和西班牙内战的可怕事件的人，还是一个用文学来预测可怕的可能性和诊断可怕的地方病倾向的小说家。20世纪的英国作家中，没有其他作家以这种方式将思想、政治评论和文学艺术融合在一起。
对于一位作品在20世纪中期动荡年代被视为最重要的作家来说，他的作品侵蚀了文学、新闻和政治评论之间的界限，但相对而言，很少有人试图为他的作品描绘出一个充满活力的人物形象。对于一位二十世纪最著名的作家来说，15年(这本书出版时接近18年)是一段很长的时间。（WYL)
Awards/获奖情况：
About the Author/作者介绍： 理查德•布拉德福德，阿尔斯特大学英语研究教授，阿维尼翁大学客座教授。他出版了超过25本广受好评的书籍，包括年度独立书籍《菲利普•拉金传记》，《艾伦•西利托授权传记》，《金斯利•艾米斯的一生》和金斯利儿子马丁的传记。
他一直为詹姆斯•泰特黑纪念奖的《入围观察者报》和《星期日泰晤士报》撰稿，为各种BBC广播艺术项目以及出现在 4频道系列的作家做采访，主要讨论在马丁•艾米斯和1960后一代的英国小说家。英国广播公司的电视节目“透过拉金的镜头”中，他的出现，是受他在其他地方的重要性影响。
Richard Bradford is Research Professor in English at Ulster University and Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon. He has published over 25 acclaimed books, including a biography of Philip Larkin, which was an Independent Book of the Year, the authorised biography of Alan Sillitoe, a life of Kingsley Amis and a biography of Kingsley’s son, Martin.
He has been on the longlist for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, has written for The Spectator and The Sunday Times and has been interviewed on his work for various BBC Radio Arts Programmes, as well as appearing on the Channel 4 Series `Writers in their Own Words’, talking mainly on Martin Amis and the post-1960s generation of British novelists. The BBC TV programme `Through the Lens of Larkin’, in which he appeared, was inspired by his The Importance of Elsewhere. Philip Larkin’s Photographs.
Format:
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：Rights sold: Brazilian Portuguese (Alaude)
原文第一章内容：暂无
手稿：暂无
大纲：暂无