Orwell's list

In 1949, shortly before he died, the English author George Orwell prepared a list of notable writers and other persons he considered to be unsuitable as possible writers for the anti-communist counter-propaganda activities of the United Kingdom's Information Research Department. A copy of the list was published in The Guardian in 2002, and the original document was released by the Foreign Office soon after.

The Information Research Department (IRD) was a propaganda unit set up by the Labour government in 1948 based at the United Kingdom's Foreign Office, after the start of the Cold War.

Celia Kirwan, who had just started working as Robert Conquest's assistant at the IRD, visited Orwell at a sanatorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis in March 1949. Orwell wrote down the names of persons he considered sympathetic to Stalinism and therefore unsuitable as writers for the Department and enclosed it in a letter to Kirwan. The list became public in 2003.

Having worked for Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, and briefly as an editorial assistant for Humphrey Slater's Polemic, Kirwan was Arthur Koestler's sister-in-law and one of the four women to whom Orwell proposed after the death of his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1945. Although Koestler had supported such a match, Kirwan turned him down.

Orwell based his list on a strictly private notebook he had maintained since the mid-1940s of possible "cryptos", "F.T." (his abbreviation for fellow travellers), outright members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, agents and sentimental sympathisers. The notebook, now at the Orwell Archive at University College London, contains 135 names in all, including US writers and politicians. Ten names had been crossed out, either because the person had died or because Orwell had decided that they were neither crypto-communists nor fellow travellers. The people named were a mélange: "some famous, some obscure, some he knew personally and others he did not." Orwell commented in New Leader in 1947:

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