Going on the air

Philip French

  • Orwell: The War Broadcasts edited by W.J. West
    Duckworth/BBC, 304 pp, £12.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 7156 1916 0

It is unlikely that the governor of Lubianka gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over thirty years successive generations of BBC producers escorting guests through the labyrinthine corridors of Broadcasting House past doors bearing inscrutably coded designations have cheerfully informed them that they’re in the building that inspired George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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[*] Forster evidently enjoyed himself so much that the following year he contributed to a similar exercise devised by André Simon for his magazine Wine and Food (the other contributors were Christopher Dilke, A.E. Coppard and James Laver). It was posthumously collected in Forster’s The Life to Come, and Other Stories (1972).