
Ian Hamilton contributed many exact, funny and unsparing pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football – to the LRB. He died in 2001.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
20 December 1984
Plain English
6 July 2000
Ectoplasm
25 November 1999
On Henry James
16 July 1998
On Mary Butts
20 June 1996
Many-Modelled
1 December 1983
Dear Sphinx
3 February 1983
Squalor
RELATED CATEGORIES
Orwell, George, Biography and memoirs, Literature and literary criticism, Fiction, Novels, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, Europe, Western Europe, UK
Vol. 20 No. 21 · 29 October 1998
pages 18-20 | 3274 words

Eric the Nerd
Ian Hamilton
- The Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davidson
Secker, twenty volumes, £750.00, July 1998, ISBN 0 436 20377 4
In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered in his address book. He has lost his address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
print this article
Letters
Vol. 20 No. 23 · 26 November 1998
From Ian Angus
I must correct Ian Hamilton’s assumption (LRB, 29 October) that I alone selected the contents of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journals and Letters (1968). The title-pages truth fully state that the four volumes are edited by Sonia Orwell and myself. For months we discussed everything we then knew Orwell had written and only those items on which we were in complete agreement were included.
Ian Angus
Cortona, Italy
Vol. 20 No. 24 · 10 December 1998
From Nicolas Walter
The new 20-volume edition of the Complete Works of George Orwell isn’t actually, as Ian Hamilton claims (LRB, 29 October), ‘utterly complete’, as the editor carefully explains. On the other hand, the 11 new volumes of shorter writings really do add a great deal to the old four volumes, including all the reviews (of plays and films as well as books), all the ‘As I Please’ columns in Tribune (as well as the deuteropseudonymous article on socialism in the Christmas 1943 issue), the Manchester Evening News articles on political ideas in 1946, all the notebooks and many more letters, far more detailed annotation, and so on.
Nicolas Walter
London N1