To Orwell Today,

Dear Jackie,

I hope this email finds you well.

I'm a researcher trying to track down photographs of, or taken by Orwell, and I really enjoyed your page on Orwell in Spain: SOLDIER ORWELL AT SPANISH FRONT. There's one scan which has a photo I'm quite interested in - could you help me by telling me which book it is from?

Is it from Gordon Bowker's biography? The photo of Orwell with the IBs in May 1937 is not one I've seen anywhere else.

Thanks so much for this article, and it is really interesting browsing around the whole site.

All best wishes,
Ameya

Greetings Ameya,

Yes, that photo of Orwell with the International Brigade in Spain in 1937 was scanned from Gordon Bowker's 2003 biography, INSIDE GEORGE ORWELL:

In the middle of the book -- between pages 240 and 241 -- there are sixteen pages of photos -- with the one you're interested in being on page 10.

So glad you're enjoying the articles on ORWELL TODAY -- great to have you as a reader.

All the best,
Jackie Jura, February 2021

TOUR ORWELL'S SPANISH TRENCHES

SOLDIER ORWELL AT SPANISH FRONT

ORWELL BULLET THRU NECK

ORWELL BIRTHDAY TYPING CATALONIA

ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT POEM

SPAIN REMEMBERS ORWELL CENTENNIAL

ORWELL'S HOMAGE TO CATALONIA

ORWELL & THE NEW STATESMAN (Orwell despised the editor of the NEW STATESMAN magazine -- Kingsley Martin -- because he refused to publish any of Orwell's 1937 Spanish Civil War articles....)

ORWELL ON WHY I WRITE (...In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.... The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.... I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and myinitial concern is to get a hearing...)