I’m reading George Orwell’s diary and Samuel Pepys’s diary one day at a time in Google Reader, as the entries are published. The two diaries are a study in contrasts. Pepys’s is detailed, run-on, and full of name-dropping, politics, and plague. Orwell’s is about gardening and the weather, spiced with observations of Morocco. Lately though it has taken on a different character, as he has included clippings from newspapers with his comments.
70 years ago in August, Europe was fast approaching war.
