International – Page 23 – For the fainthearted . . .

Places that are almost real

There is a signpost between Hanley Castle and Powick pointing to St. Cloud. The placename evokes memories of the tales of Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s fictional close to the city of St. Cloud in Minnesota. It would be a delight to be near Lake Wobegon, a community for which Keillor creates a delight in the ordinary and the commonplace, a celebration of the dignity of everyday people who live everyday lives.

Anyone familiar with Keillor’s work will know his tales and his characters in the fictional town of Lake Wobegon …

On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who lived through the most horrible episode in human history. He was a Jew who fought against the Fascists who controlled Italy under Mussolini. In 1943, he was captured and put into a prison camp. The Jewish prisoners were taken from the camp and put onto a train, 650 of them were put into twelve railway wagons. The train went across Austria and Czechoslovakia to Poland, to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

This is how Primo Levi describes the arrival at the most awful …

Orwell was too smart to have a smartphone

“Would George Orwell have had a smartphone?” asks a page title on the BBC website. Without clicking on the link, there is no hesitation in giving an answer in the negative.

The writer of 1984 would have recoiled at the idea of the control of the world’s information by a handful of major corporations. Computer-generated algorithms have the capacity to shape the knowledge available through a phone without the repressive measures featured in Orwell’s novel. The major Internet companies will declare that there is complete freedom of speech in the …

Damaging indecision

It was announced that Redcar British Steel railway station was no longer the least used in Britain, numbers of passengers using the station had increased nine-fold, from 40 in 2018 to 360 in 2019. It was speculated that much of the increase might be attributable to railway enthusiasts wanting to see Britain’s most unfrequented station.

Even at 360 passengers for the year, it is hard to imagine there would be a business case for the retention of the station. The cost of electricity, cleaning, maintenance and public liability insurance must …

Dodgy geography

Writing in his diary on 26th January 1941, George Orwell laments the lack of geographical knowledge among ordinary people. It was a lack that led to a misunderstanding of the unfolding events of the war.

Listening in the other day to somebody else’s telephone conversation, as one is always doing nowadays owing to the crossing of wires, I heard two women talking to the effect of “it won’t be long now” etc., etc. The next morning, going into Mrs J.’s shop, I happened to remark that the war would probably

…

Orwellian details

“Perhaps the twentieth century’s best chronicler of English culture,” said The Economist of George Orwell. Reading Orwell’s diaries gives an insight into the encyclopaedic mind from which came the novels for which he is remembered.

There seems no detail of the lives of ordinary people in which he was not interested. Visiting poor communities, he notes every aspect of living conditions: housing, incomes and expenditures; food and drink; leisure activities; work and working conditions; political loyalties and activities. Orwell has an eye for the minutiae of people’s existences, he describes …