Orwell’s diaries

The good folks over at the Orwell Prize are doing a cool thing reminscent of that WWI letters blog I posted about a while ago. They’re reposting all of George Orwell’s diary entries in real time, exactly 70 years after Orwell first wrote them.

The August entries are from his domestic diaries. The political ones kick off on September 7th. I don’t know if that’s a convention Orwell himself used, or if it’s just how they classify them at the Orwell Prize.

So far the entries are relatively mundane stuff about the weather and George catching snakes, although I don’t mean that dismissively. It’s refreshingly genuine, and I’m glad George Orwell bucked the trend and didn’t kill snakes.

The footnotes are money, complete with Shakespeare quotes to explain a passing reference.