Orwell’s Enduring Significance in Courts of Law

INTRODUCTION AND ABSTRACT

The novels and essays of George Orwell are now being quoted in court rulings throughout the world. However, Orwell never held any significant legal or judicial role, and he was not involved in any civil rights, media law, or freedom of expression litigation. no case law exists around the content or censorship of his work. This paper investigates how and why Orwellian literary metaphors and views are referred to in legal disputes in the British and European courts. It is argued that his influence is based on his strong moral and political views on human liberty, justice and fairness.

REFERENCE IN PRECEDENTS

There are not many creative novelists whose fiction is quoted to support principle and argument at the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. Some 71 years after his death, George Orwell has had this privilege in the seminal ruling on state electronic surveillance in the case between Big Brother Watch and others versus the United Kingdom. Even the named party owes its identity to the central menacing and totalitarian character in Orwell’s last novel. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was cited in paragraph six in the partly concurring speech of Judges Lemmens, Vehabović and Bošnjak:

… privacy is essential for democratic self-governance. Mass surveillance exerts internal and external pressures to conform, making individuals submissive and deferential. In order to avoid outright oppression and give itself the varnish of legitimacy, there is an inherent danger that the state will utilise surveillance to ensure compliance and conformism. As George Orwell described in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized’ (Big Brother v UK 2021, Concurring speech: para 6).1

In the British courts, an Orwell homily features as the first sentence of the judgment of Mr Justice Julian Knowles in the case of ‘The Queen on the application of Harry Miller, Claimant and The College of Policing and the Chief Constable of Humberside’. This is a case where the judge decided the police response to Mr Miller’s allegedly transphobic tweets was unlawful.

Officers from Humberside Police visited him at his work in 2019 after a complaint about the tweets. He was told he had not committed a crime, but the complaints about his communications would be recorded as a non-crime ‘hate incident’. The judge found the force’s actions were a ‘disproportionate interference’ with the claimant’s right to freedom of expression.

The media and public had a good idea of how the case would be decided when the judge began by explaining:

In his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell wrote: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ (Miller v. College of Policing et al. 2020: para 1).

Mr Justice Knowles continued to weave previous case law with references to Shakespeare and Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is, of course, the 1949 novel by George Orwell which coined the term ‘thoughtcrime’ to describe a person’s politically unorthodox or unacceptable thoughts. The Thought Police are the secret police of the superstate Oceania, who discover and punish thoughtcrime (ibid: para 89).

Harry Miller was described as ‘a shareholder in a plant and machinery company in Lincolnshire. He happens to be a former police officer. He holds a number of degrees and formerly taught in higher education. He is intelligent and highly educated’ (ibid: para 18). And he would be characterised as an unwitting victim of state abuse of power and challenge to individual liberty.

In 2020, Orwell’s writings, then, had provided the rationale for a court’s decision and not merely its illustrative obiter dicta. The judge explained that legal counsel for the police had:

… both sought to play down the police’s actions. They said that there had been no interference with the claimant’s free expression rights or, if there had, it was at a trivial level. In my judgment these submissions impermissibly minimise what occurred and do not properly reflect the value of free speech in a democracy. There was not a shred of evidence that the claimant was at risk of committing a criminal offence. The effect of the police turning up at his place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated. To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society (ibid: para 259).

Mr Justice Knowles endorsed and extended a jurisprudential understanding of freedom of expression that derived from Enlightenment and post Enlightenment philosophy. In many respects he is an Orwellian in his rejection of authoritarian post- Marxist theory. Orwell may well have approved his referencing of John Stuart Mill from On Liberty:

In his treatise On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wrote: ‘If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.’

For the reasons I have set out, whilst Mrs B. made a complaint that was recorded under (Hate Crime Operational Guidance) HCOG, the police’s treatment of the claimant thereafter disproportionately interfered with his right of freedom of expression, which is an essential component of democracy for all of the reasons I explained at the beginning of this judgment (ibid: paras 288-289).

In these two important court cases, Orwell’s politics and philosophy about freedom of expression and the dangers of censorship have been successfully shifted from his fictional worlds to the everyday reality of the struggle by individuals to maintain those freedoms in the present day.

Orwell has been referenced in many human rights cases at the European Court in Strasbourg. In the 2018 case of Sinkova v. Ukraine, a member of an artistic group called the St Luke Brotherhood, known for its politically provocative public performances, obtained a ruling declaring that her right to liberty and security had been breached through unlawful police detention. Although the court decided her Article 10 freedom of expression rights had not been breached, three partly dissenting judges thought they had and observed:

In the present case, the Soviet song with a repeated refrain (‘The battle is going on again and again’) as a soundtrack to the video also underlines the satirical nature of the protest, and is self-explanatory – the protesters were criticising, in their view, the hypocritical behaviour of authorities who do not want to accept that the battle is already over and that it is time to propose real and not illusory care of those who handed the victory. The applicant’s actions, and those of her associates, undoubtedly generated significant controversy and offence among many of those who became aware of it, due perhaps to its perceived bad taste, but their aim was the opposite: in the words of George Orwell, ‘the aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded’ (Sinkova v Ukraine 2018, partly dissenting opinion: para 8).

Orwell was previously referenced at the Grand Chamber level in 2012 in the case of Mouvement Raëlien Suisse v Switzerland. The aim of Mouvement Raëlien was to make the first contacts and establish good relations with extraterrestrials and it was challenging the banning of its posters by the Swiss authorities arguing breaches of Article 9, right to freedom of religion and Article 10, freedom of expression. But the Grand Chamber ruled there had been no breach. They agreed that the banning of the campaign material by the Swiss Federal Court was justified due to its content including ‘the promotion of human cloning, the advocating of “geniocracy” and the possibility that the Raelian Movement’s literature and ideas might lead to sexual abuse of children by some of its members’ (Mouvement Raëlien Suisse v Switzerland 2012: para 71).

The Orwell quotation was present in the dissenting opinion of Judge Pinto de Albuquerque:

… freedom of expression in a public forum is applicable not only to ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the majority. Such are the demands of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no ‘democratic society’. To use the words of George Orwell, ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ (ibid, dissenting opinion: para 8).

Judge Pinto de Albuquerque quoted Orwell’s words from the preface to the first edition of his Animal Farm (1945). He added: ‘The preface was not published and was only discovered in the author’s original typescript some years later. It was published in The Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1972’ (ibid, dissenting opinion: notation 34). These words significantly feature as the inscription on George Orwell’s statue in the courtyard of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House.

Orwell did somewhat famously observe that at its worst the BBC could be described ‘something half-way between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum’. His knowledge was based on the personal experience of working there for 27 months, from August 1941 to November 1943 as a talks producer. He may have agreed that only an institution such as the BBC could be chastised by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2018 for failing to respond to a request for information about a statue of himself, for breaching the legislation and being obliged to ‘provide the complainant with a response to his request in accordance with its obligations under FOIA’. 2

Jurisprudential weaving of Orwellian metaphors and narratives have a habit of taking root in freedom of expression disputes where there is a search for historical truth and justice. The frustrated endeavours of his first recognised full-length biographer, Professor Bernard Crick, have been argued in an action in the tribunal system for Metropolitan Police Special Branch files concerning state surveillance of staff and students at Goldsmiths, University of London before 1989, and particularly during the Cold War.

The ICO and FOI Tribunal system has been stubbornly refusing to apply a near unanimous Grand Chamber ruling in 2016 giving recognition to academic researchers, journalists and investigating NGOs a qualified standing right to state archives. It was fully argued before the First Tier Tribunal Information Rights in a hearing in May 2021 that they should appreciate damage to the public interest caused by the withholding of the Special Branch file on George Orwell from Professor Bernard Crick in 1977 (Crook v ICO and Met. Police 2021: para 39).

The Metropolitan Police Special Branch file on ‘Eric Blair alias George Orwell, author and journalist. Communist’ was released to the public domain on 13 July 2005. 3 It is detailed and comprehensive on the extent of Special Branch and MI5 surveillance and analysis of his political activities and their perceived threat to national security.

It contains a letter which reveals that Professor Crick was prevented from knowing about and, indeed, having access to ‘a copy of a Special Branch report of 11 March 1936 on Eric Blair (George Orwell) which is among a small collection of papers relating to Eric Blair in the India Office Records’. 4 Had he been given access his whole approach to a research and writing project on the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been transformed and inevitably different. It was strongly argued that concealing this information requested by Professor Crick in 1977 strongly damaged the public interest of historical research and enquiry and the quality and purpose of contributing to democratic debate about Orwell’s literature, links to state surveillance and potential interference with his life and times. How will the Orwell narrative play out in future FOI Tribunal and higher court rulings? Indeed, the irony of his having written so creatively in Nineteen Eighty-Four about his character Winston Smith being employed by the Big Brother regime to manipulate public memory and history with the rewriting of archives and their destruction through incineration into memory holes is certainly called to mind:

‘There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified and other rubbed out of existence’ (Orwell 1997 [1949]: 45).

Consequently, the deployment of Orwellian literary metaphor may have its origin in the submission of legal argument and evidence in litigation or its retrieval by the education and reading of judges. Orwell’s Stakhanovite horse character Boxer in Animal Farm enjoys a full name-check in a ruling by Family High Court Judge Mr Justice Williams in the 2018 case of ME, MP and R. Orwell will, no doubt, have relished his novel being cited in a law case rendered anonymous with the alphabet soup-like listing of parties, an activity Franz Kafka satirised by giving his central character the name of ‘Joseph K’ in his novel The Trial (1925). The learned judge was exercised by the need for overworked lawyers to give so much of their time, expertise and labour without payment in a legal system seriously lacking in legal aid provision:

That counsel for the father and for the mother should appear pro bono in such a complex case as this is in the finest traditions of the legal profession. Up and down the country, counsel, solicitors and legal executives fill the gaping holes in the fabric of legal aid in private law cases because of their commitment to the delivery of justice. Without such public-spirited lawyers how would those such as the father and mother in this case navigate the process and present their cases? How judges manage to deliver justice to the parties and an appropriate judgment for the child without such assistance in cases like this begs the question. It is a blight on the current legal aid system that cases such as this do not attract public funding. So far removed from the stereotyped ‘fat-cat’, the legal profession in cases such as this are more akin to Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm always telling themselves ‘I will work harder’ (R. – A child 2018: para 13).

The higher courts in Ireland have also shown respectful acknowledgement of Orwell’s writing when dealing with serious human rights and civil liberties issues. In Dwyer v Commissioner of An Garda Síochána & ors, the Irish High Court was grappling with the question: ‘In what circumstances does a democracy tolerate state-mandated electronic surveillance of every citizen who uses a telephone device?’ (Dwyer 2018: para 1). Nineteen Eighty-Four, again, was an inspiration and warning:

In 1949, George Orwell published the dystopian novel 1984 which portrays a dehumanizing and unpleasant society that resonates with the feared abuse of 21st century surveillance. The prospect of anything resembling such a society prompts an obiter statement that organs of the state should tread carefully when trenching upon the dignity and privacy of the human person in the sphere of telephony data retention and access. Just as crime is required to be investigated, there should be transparency of use or abuse of power.

Notification, supervision and enforceable sanctions are means to limit abuses. The chilling effect on privacy and the rights of free expression and association by actual, feared and mandatory surveillance cannot be underestimated (Dwyer 2018: para 5.13).

In Hickey v McGowan & ors in the Irish Supreme Court in 2017, the Chief Justice and four other justices found guidance in Orwell’s essay in which he wrote about the English being a nation of club joiners:

To speak of an unincorporated association implies a body of some substance. Given the importance of clubs sporting and otherwise in Ireland, it would be wrong to underestimate the social significance of such a body. George Orwell observed that the English are a nation of joiners, but the observation could be applied with equal merit in Ireland, although the list of activities might not put the same emphasis on the flower arranging, pigeon fancying and dart playing praised by Orwell (Hickey 2017: para 53).

This is an example of the judiciary benchmarking an analogy or metaphor in legal analysis alongside one of Orwell’s gentle polemics; in this case the ‘Part 1: England Your England’ in Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, first published in 1941. Here, Orwell enthused about: … the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’ (Orwell 1941: 15).

WRITING INJUSTICE

Orwell’s years of service as a law enforcing officer of the British Empire (1922-1927) would have certainly introduced him to the complexities of criminal law, prosecution and the administration of summary justice. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he describes how he had been corrupted by the role he performed in Burma. It can certainly be argued that his life and writing after leaving the police was an expiation and exorcism of guilt and disgust about the abuse of power and exploitation of human beings he had witnessed. Orwell certainly remembers being chastised by a Non-comformist missionary who turned to him while they were looking on at the bullying of a native suspect:

‘I wouldn’t care to have your job.’

It made me horribly ashamed. So that was the kind of job I had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a tee-total cock- virgin from the middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me! But I should have felt the same shame even if there had been no one to bring it home to me. I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of the whole machinery of so-called justice. Say what you will, our criminal law (far more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock- ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts of the men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest – things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders (Orwell 1937: 178).

Orwell’s 1931 Adelphi essay ‘A hanging’ remains a classic on the barbarism of state execution. It is much more compelling than anything the great 19th century journalist and novelist Charles Dickens, a writer Orwell admired and analysed so much, ever achieved on the subject. Dickens will be remembered for his striking depictions of arbitrary justice in France’s revolutionary reign of terror in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and the sentimental and poignant portrait of Fagin in the condemned cell of Newgate Prison in Oliver Twist (1838). The brilliance in Orwell’s documentary writing in ‘A hanging’ is in having a condemned subject with no name and no history in terms of previous trial and conviction. His criminal culpability, guilt or innocence is not the point. The single sentence describing the condemned man’s walk to the gallows has come to represent the humanity and sympathy for the human spirit in Orwell’s writing: ‘And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path’ (Orwell 1970 [1931]: 68). He continues:

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live (ibid).

Orwell next focuses on a large shabby woolly dog – ‘half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback to grab at the dog’ (ibid). When the superintendent cries: ‘Who let that bloody brute in here?’ the reader is left in no doubt about who the real brutes are in this story.

Between 1900 and 1949, 621 men and 11 women were executed in England and Wales (Royal Commission 1953: 304-305). A BBC television documentary series regularly revisits their cases often bringing up new evidence and arguments raising serious questions about unsafe and unsatisfactory verdicts (BBC Media Centre 2018). Ten German agents were executed during the First World War under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, and 16 spies were executed during World War Two under the Treachery Act 1940. These killings roughly cover the span of Orwell’s lifetime (1903- 1950). The numbers of those despatched for capital crimes in the British Empire were considerably more and not just for murder, sedition and treason. The possession of a firearm was enough to attract capital execution during the British Mandate in Palestine between 1918 and 1948. The gallows at the British-run Akko prison have been preserved by the modern state of Israel along with the graffiti scored into the walls by young Zionists before they were hanged (Akko Museum 2021).

Whereas Dickens was fascinated by the individual characteristics of judges, lawyers and criminals – from Magistrate Fang, Jaggers the attorney, and Wemmick the barristers’ clerk, to Jarndyce, Krook, Vholes, Gridley, Guppy and Tulkinghorn in Bleak House (1853) and the legal theatre of the Court of Chancery and other judicial chambers – Orwell concentrated on how law was used with totalitarian and cynical brutality. The lady of justice wears a mask in the Orwellian narrative of good and evil. The show trials and summary justice depicted in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty- Four represent the jurisprudential end game. Justice is injustice. Orwell writes about the law as a terrible moral inversion. He can never get away from ‘the feeling that punishment is evil’ and ‘arises inescapably in those who have to administer it’ (Orwell 1937: 179).

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND CENSORSHIP

Orwell’s personal encounters with the law, jurists, lawyers and judges were never particularly congenial or positive. His first publisher Victor Gollancz had frequently to censor his manuscripts to ward off the potential and threat of libel action. English libel law was always notoriously weighted in favour of plaintiffs with the defendants having the burden of proof in relation to justification. As Gordon Bowker observes, libel for Gollancz ‘was a sore point with him, having been sued in 1931 over a book set in an identifiable girls’ school in Kensington’ (Bowker 2003: 137). Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris and London would be gutted of many original names and representations of Anglo-Saxon invective. Gollancz worried about actions for obscenity, blasphemy and libel (Crick 1992 [1980]: 223).

His solicitor Harold Rubinstein confirmed libel would be an issue. A similar fate attended Orwell’s novels. The first, Burmese Days (1934), was a scathing and vivid denunciation of his life and society during his time as an assistant superintendent of the Indian Imperial Police. Fear of libel had prompted Heinemann to turn it down. Victor Gollancz was so worried he wrote to Orwell’s agent saying ‘I feel that I really sooner not go further with it. I can’t face the sleepless nights’ (Crick op cit: 245). The novel was actually first published in the USA the previous year.

The next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), contained Orwell’s vituperative attack on the racket of private schools, extremely well-grounded because it was based so strongly on his personal experience. Gollancz and his learned legal friends were again concerned over the libel risks. Solicitor Rubinstein’s critique extended well beyond what would presumably ‘lower the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally’ to many aspects of the manuscript’s plot and style (Crick op cit: 257-258). Publication would only be possible with many excisions ringed in the lawyer’s blue pencil. Yet concealing the fact that the central character Dorothy had been raped meant many of her subsequent actions and experiences would become bizarre and inexplicable (Meyers 2001: 119). Orwell would call A Clergyman’s Daughter ‘bollox’ and ‘tripe’ (ibid) and later was so ashamed of it that he left instructions in his will for it never to be reprinted or translated (Crick 1992 [1980]: 258).

Covers of Penguin editions of George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter

Libel in the 1930s was a cynical game of power, money, class, race and privilege. The 1932 case involving Lady Edwina Mountbatten and the Sunday People newspaper exemplified the cover-up of hypocrisy, racism and truth in defamation law. A columnist called the Watcher implied Lady Edwina had to leave London society because she had been caught ‘in compromising circumstances with a coloured man’ (Sunderland Echo and Shipping Gazette 1932). She sued, the paper immediately conceded and offered her substantial damages that she refused to receive. She gave evidence at the High Court settlement hearing that everyone, including her friends, knew who the black man referred to was, but ‘in fact, I have never in the whole course of my life ever met the man referred to. … The whole thing is a preposterous story’ (ibid). But the actual truth was that she was having an affair with another black man, the entertainer and singer Leslie Hutchinson.

It is certainly possible that his frustrations with media law contributed to Orwell’s publicly stated sympathy for writers censored and banned such as Henry Miller (ibid: 306-307) and D. H. Lawrence (Bowker 2003: 432). While desperately ill from tuberculosis and struggling to complete the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell would enthusiastically support campaigning groups for civil rights and freedom of expression (Crick 1992 [1980]: 497 and 556).

ORWELL AND SUMMARY JUSTICE

Orwell was never a plaintiff nor a defendant in any significant test case advancing his famous quotation on the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In one of his unpublished essays ‘The Clink’ he describes getting drunk under the assumed identity of a fish porter called Edward Burton in December 1931 so he can directly experience the indignity of a one pound fine or a day in prison for vagrancy. Luke Seaber, of University College London, confirmed by searching the London Metropolitan Archives that Orwell did, in fact, receive such summary jurisdiction for the crime of being drunk and incapable before Old Street Magistrates on 21 December 1931 under this assumed identity (Flood: 2014). Gordon Bowker suggests this was evidence of Orwell’s iconoclastic commitment to honestly reporting justice for the poor and powerless (ibid).

CONCLUSION

George Orwell carried the guilt and shame of his upbringing and privileged middle class background in an extraordinary masochistic mission to experience injustice himself, to know how the poor lived, and directly understand the culture of the beggars and down-and- outs in Great Britain. Poverty, for Orwell, was a crucial human rights issue. It is significant, then, how the words and notions of justice and freedom, two fundamental precepts in modern human rights charters and conventions, feature in summaries on Orwell’s life and literature. George Woodcock talks of ‘the crystal spirit’ of his ‘crystalline prose … developed so that reality could always show through its transparency’ (Woodcock 1970: 278). Orwell was ‘a good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive’ (ibid). According to Jeffrey Meyers: ‘Writing in an anxious, atheistic age, Orwell fought for social justice and believed that it was essential to have both personal and political integrity’ (Meyers 2001: 325). Gordon Bowker emphasises that Orwell ‘revealed in the starkest way the threat which not only totalitarianism offers to individual freedom and thought (and literature, in its finest expression) but also science unconstrained by morality’ (Bowker 2003: 434).

Indeed, the importance of Orwell’s literary and political legacy takes on new meaning and purpose when the values and principles which concerned him most are cited in the significant human rights cases of the present age.

NOTES

1 The ruling properly references the quotation to the early pages of a 2008 Penguin edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four

2 See BBC (2018) UKICO fs50725917, 25 May. Available online at https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/uk/cases/UKICO/2018/fs50725917.html https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKICO/2018/fs50725917.html, and https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKICO/2018/fs50725917.pdf accessed on 5 October 2021

3 George Orwell alias Eric Arthur BLAIR: British. Born in India, The National Archives, Security Service, KV 2/2699, released 2007. Available online at https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11377649, accessed on 5 October 2021

4 Ibid p. 8

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Big Brother Watch and others v. the United Kingdom (2021) – 58170/13 (Judgment: Preliminary objection dismissed: Grand Chamber) ECHR 439, 25 May. Available online at https://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/2021/439.html, accessed on 5 October 2021

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Dwyer v. Commissioner of An Garda Síochána & ors (Rev1) (2018) IEHC 685, 6 December. Available online at https://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/2018/H685.html, accessed on 5 October 2021

Flood, Alison (2014) George Orwell’s jail time confirmed by unseen court records, Guardian, 4 December. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/04/george-orwell-jail-time-unseen-court-records, accessed on 5 October 2021

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Orwell, George (1970 [1931]) A hanging, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1, An Age Like This, 1920-1940, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 66-71

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Sunderland Echo and Shipping Gazette (1932) ‘Monstrous libel’ against Lady Louis Mountbatten, 8 July p. 1. The British Newspaper Archive. Available online at: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000640/19320708/002/0001 , accessed on 5 October 2021

Woodcock, George (1970) The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

This paper was first published in George Orwell Studies Volume Six No. 1 in 2021, pages 85-98.

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