Anyone who browses for an hour or so in Peter Davison’s 20-volume edition of George Orwell’s Complete Works is liable to emerge with half a dozen instances of what a supremely odd character its author was. Curiously enough, this oddity tends to declare itself not in flights of polemical fantasy but in off-the-cuff generalising remarks – his conviction, say, that every nurse wears a set of Union Jack buttons, or that “all tobacconists are Fascists” – and it becomes odder still in the field of religion. One might note, for example, a letter sent in 1949 to his friend Malcolm Muggeridge about a magazine advert portraying Zeus in a pair of Wolsey socks and captioned “fit for the Gods”. “I think you will agree that it is in its way really blasphemous,” Orwell lamented.
10 January 2018, The Tablet
The other Saint George: George Orwell's nuanced and ambivalent views's on Religion
George Orwell
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