It is hard to pick a favorite Orwell essay but I suppose that of the half dozen short pieces I use with young students, one always gets a greater response than others.MARRAKECH begins:
"As the corpse went past, the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later."
Orwell was convalescing in North Africa in 1938 when his eyes were blasted open to the majesty and misery of that burned landscape. What if blogging had been available to such a man? Mr. Blair had a body which sometimes failed him, but he was also a human being endowed with incredibly acute observational skills and whose narrow shoulders bore a social conscience of heroic proportion. Beginning today, and for months to come, we can read Orwell's North Africa diary and share in his daily discoveries.
Big Brother watches the blogs.
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