War is boring; revolution is boring; politics is boring. That’s the message of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. But, somehow, Homage to Catalonia itself is NOT boring. Published in 1938, it charts Orwell’s experience on, behind and beyond the front line of the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. 

Through the course of his narrative, written in the weeks immediately following his return to England, adrenalin still pumping in his veins, Orwell takes us through the complexity of internecine factionalism in Republican Barcelona, derring-do raids on General Franco’s trenches, his own experience of being shot in the throat by a fascist sniper, and the narrow escape by himself and his wife Eileen when they became political targets of the Soviet Union with a warrant out for their arrest. 

Homage to Catalonia was a massive flop - think Betamax video, New Coke, or Michael Jackson’s Invincible album - selling less than a thousand copies, but it has become recognised as a masterpiece of reportage. Most importantly, it contains the political awakening and many of the ideas leading directly to Animal Farm and 1984. In these pages, we see Orwell’s horror of totalitarianism, his fear of rats, the betrayal of workers by their supposedly revolutionary leaders, of newspaper censorship rewriting the past with alternative facts. And, in anarchist Barcelona, we even see a glimpse of Airstrip One - a crumbling post-revolutionary city with blue-overall wearing citizens, gradually succumbing to Stalinist mind-control. 

This is the second episode in our four-part series on George Orwell. The first, following Orwell’s early life was about the impact of the First World War, the moral abyss of the British Empire and the Great Depression on his first book Down and Out in Paris and London. In this, Sophie and Jonty look at the rise of fascism in Europe through Orwell’s front row seat of the Spanish Civil War, taking us up to brink of the Second World War. 

Content warning: mild bad language 

Books referenced, quoted, or mentioned: 

Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor 

WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder 

Essays by George Orwell

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell 

People of the Abyss (1904) by Jack London 

Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller 

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) by Siegfried Sassoon

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway

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