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George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father

The literary giant’s only child reflects on his father’s devotion in their days together in rural Scotland, his early death, his genius as a writer – and his reputation as a womaniser

Orwell, perhaps the most influential writer of the 20th century, railed against totalitarianism in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; chronicled it in his memoir about fighting in the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia; and satirised it in his wonderful fable Animal Farm. Orwell was a police officer in Burma, now Myanmar; ran around with revolutionaries in Spain, where he got shot in the throat; lived on the streets in London; hung out in brothels in Paris; and retreated to the remote island of Jura towards the end of his life to write Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The GuardianThe notebook, in which Orwell named 135 suspected communist sympathisers, was handed to his friend Kirwan in 1949, while she was working at the Foreign Office’s semi-secret Information Research Department.

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