T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for Faber & Faber

Stefan Collini has reviewed the latest volume of T.S. Eliot's letters for the London Review of Books. It covers the years 1942-4, and the most striking thing about the review is the revelation of how little time Eliot spent writing poetry and how much he devoted to his duties for the publishers Faber & Faber.

One advantage that firm had over other publishers was that it was based in Russel Square rather than the traditional book-trade quarter of Pasternoster Row, which stood in the shadow of St Paul's and was heavily bombed in the London Blitz.

Collini also writes about Eliot's most famous business decision: his rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm:

In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. 

Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot "see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for", but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript "have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time". 

Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book "was a great mistake on our part". Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. 

The rejection letter suggests that the book's "positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing", but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. 

With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted. 

Collini, incidentally, quotes some of Eliot's verdicts on his contemporaries – Orwell is "a very queer bird".

Now Ed Davey is implying that Nigel Farage is right

Photo © BadgerHero

Early last week I sent off my latest piece for Central Bylines. In it I praised Ed Davey's willingness to challenge the right's claims to patriotism:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

By the time it appeared, Ed Davey had issued this video.

Winston Churchill helped defeat fascism in Europe. He deserves better than being replaced by a badger 🦡

[image or embed]

— Ed Davey (@eddavey.libdems.org.uk) 11 March 2026 at 17:30

Far from challenging the right, this as good as admits they are correct. Yes, it implies, the country is run by an elite of woke politicians who hold everything we Britons love in contempt.

Ed even starts with "Now they're going to take Winston Churchill of our fivers...", which is a journalistic tactic designed to give the impression that the isolated incident you are writing about is in fact only the latest in a long catalogue of outrages. A hard-right commentator could have used exactly the same angle.

In this video, the Liberal Democrats are adopting Labour's failed strategy of telling people "Reform are right about everything but you mustn't vote for them."

I sometimes fear that some of Ed's advisers are a little too online. Remember when they wrote a tweet for him expressing his shock at the shooting of Charlie Kirk? Had Ed even heard of him?

Anyway, let me end with a photograph caption from James Hawes's new The Shortest History of Ireland that's relevant to those advisers' choice of music:

The past is a strange country: Howth gun-runners Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers aboard the yacht Asgard. From Limerick and Boston respectively, they – and Molly's novelist husband Erskine – were radical Irish Nationalists from the WASP elite: Mary's first cousin Cecil, author of the imperial touch-song I Vow to Thee My Country, was right then Britain's ambassador to the United States.

When John Smith's Magnet Ales were advertised across York

When I was a student in York the corner shops in the backstreets all had advertising John Smith's Magnet Ales.

The shops have mostly closed and, while the name Magnet still survives, the beer is no longer brewed at John Smith's Tadcaster brewery but produced under licence by Cameron's in Hartlepool.

I did find a couple of relics of Magnet advertising when I went hunting for the blue plaque on Frankie Howerd's childhood home in York.

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There's also a large archive of back numbers of Liberator to explore there. See the recent issues and the archive of older issues. 

The Joy of Six 1489

Searchlight has the measure of Reform UK's leader: "It’s a script Nigel Farage knows well. Candidates or causes closely linked to him, perhaps even bearing his name and his photograph, make large, attention-grabbing promises. Votes are won on the strength of them. Then, once the votes are counted the promises are declared – with an air of wounded innocence – to have never been made, and certainly not by him."

AI fakes spread disinformation but, asks Anna Merlan, is the distrust they create even worse?

"Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. 'We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.'" Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed the Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners.

Patrick Wadden argues that Medieval Irish people saw themselves as Europeans, not Celts: "The Irish language and people were only labelled as Celtic for the first time in the 18th century. In the rich and varied textual sources that have survived from early Ireland, including annals, saints' lives, laws, and sagas about great heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhail, the words 'Celt' and 'Celtic' do not appear even once."

"In the case of Peter Grimes, Forster suggests, something is lost. Rather than Grimes as a lugubrious murderer, in Britten’s opera the blame is rather sanctimoniously placed on the townsfolk for misunderstanding him, turning the whole thing into social criticism, which was far from Crabbe’s original. It takes away from the strangeness and mystery of the character of Grimes, from his psychological complexity, but also from the ‘horizontality and mud’ that shape the feeling of the poem and the world it describes." John-Paul Stonnard finds that E.M. Forster did not appreciate the version of George Crabbe's character Peter Grimes presented by Montague Slater, who wrote the libretto for Britten's opera.

Helen Pickles rightly suggests Ripon, Yorkshire's smallest city, as a tourist destination.

Searching for Frankie Howerd in York

I've made it back from York. Our spring conferences always seem to involve too much travel and not enough conference, so I rarely attend them. But it was good to meet old friends and have a look round the city where I took my first degree many years ago.

One sight I made sure of seeing in York this time was the blue plaque on Frankie Howerd's early childhood home. The map suggested you could walk to it through a park that runs along the banks of the Ouse, but the park turned out to be flooded. I was forced to find a more inland route.

There's a reason that Hartoft Street, where I found the plaque, was built so it ended well short of the river and in steps taking you down to the park.

Abul Mogard: In a Studded Procession

I came across this on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves, but what they played was an orchestration of In a Studded Procession rather than the electronic version above. If you want to hear that, and I think it's preferable, then go to Night Waves for 1 March on BBC Sounds and you will find it starting at 35:50.

If you don't want to bother with that, the version here is still very good.

Abul Mogard? Digital in Berlin explains:

Abul Mogard is an alter-ego created by Guido Zen, an Italian musician currently based in Rome. He has performed at renowned venues such as Berlin Atonal, Poesia En Voz Alta, Auditorium San Fedele and South Bank Centre.

The Organ Reframed Festival commissioned him to write a composition for the pipe organ that he performed at London’s Union Chapel with the London Contemporary Orchestra. He has remixed Carl Craig and Fovea Hex (with Brian Eno) and his music has been used for films by Ridley Scott, in BBC TV programmes, accompanying contemporary artworks, and at fashion shows for Ferragamo.

I was reading when In a Studded Procession came on the radio that night, but I soon found myself devoting all my attention to it. The track may sound like film music, but I'd love to see the film.

Standing Stones of Leicestershire and Rutland

Some local lithic goodness from the redoubtable Bob Trubshaw.

The making of Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies (1963)

Lord of the Flies was first filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Gerald Fell, who died in 2021, was the editor of the film and also a sort of auxiliary cinematographer on the set. Here he talks about the making of the film.

For Central Bylines: Ed Davey takes aim at the unpatriotic right

I have a new article on Central Bylines this morning:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

I wrote this before Ed Davey decided that Nigel Farage is right about badgers being woke and we have to have Churchill on our banknotes.

The Joy of Six 1488

"It’s what happens when the NHS has run out of room. It means intimate conversations about cancer, stroke, or dementia in earshot of strangers. It means delays to assessment and treatment, including pain relief, become more likely – dignity stripped away through lack of capacity." Danny Chambers says corridor care will continue for another three years – and that’s not good enough.

Nick Bowes reckons political fragmentation could lead to the most interesting London election results since the 32 boroughs were formed.

"When e-cigarettes first appeared around 2010, they were hailed as a breakthrough: nicotine delivery without the toxic tar and combustion byproducts of traditional cigarettes. Public health bodies cautiously endorsed them as a tool for adult smokers to quit, often citing early claims that vaping was 95 per cent less harmful than smoking. More than a decade later, with millions now vaping regularly, the picture is less clear." Vikram Niranjan reports on warning signs that vaping may not be as benign as we thought.

Black female footballers are praised for their strength, white female footballers are praised for their intelligence. Paul Ian Campbell and Allison Thompson discuss the findings of their research.

Jude Rogers chooses her 10 best folk albums of 2025.

Ray Newman follows in the footsteps of Henry VII, who made a pilgrimage to the holy well of St Anne  near Bristol in 1486: "If you want to stick to something like Henry’s route, you have to push past rows of signs and columns cones, squeeze between temporary fences, evade robotic security sentinels that shout at you if you linger too long, and leap muddy puddles in a road surface turned into no-man’s-land by the constant passing of concrete mixers."

Celebrity dog trainer sues government for £8m over upheaval caused by HS2

The Independent wins our Headline of the Day Award and the judges thought you might enjoy this example of a celebrity dog trainer's work.

Achieving economic growth takes more than booing Nimbys

New housing at Wellington Place, Market Harborough

There's an article on Liberal Democrat Voice today by Steve Wootton announcing the formation of Lib Dems for Growth. The group will have a stall at the York spring conference this weekend.

Economic growth does sound like the answer to our prayers, though the environmental constraints on it are becoming more apparent. But that's not what worries me about the statement from the group that Steve quotes.

Like a lot of people who call for economic growth, it rather assumes that British industry would leap into action and deliver growth at a startling rate if it weren't for the stage army of planning officers and Nimbys that they bring on to be denounced.

As far as there are problems with the planning system, I suspect they run deeper than people getting up petitions against new housing development. For one view of what's wrong, have a look at the paper Dan Davis wrote for Labour Together: Build the rail! Save the snails! How to really fix UK infrastructure planning.

In it he argues:

UK infrastructure projects cost significantly more than European equivalents, and the time and money spent on the pre-construction phase is greater here than in any other country. This is because our system treats projects as "guilty until proven innocent" and provides feedback too late to correct course efficiently. 

Developers, consultants and planning authorities all respond to uncertainty by over-mitigating potential objections. The cause is not environmental regulation itself, but an adversarial planning system that incentivises pre-emptive risk aversion.

But what if the problem lies deeper still? What if our industry isn't well placed to make that great leap forward?

Chris Dillow often writes about the poor quality of British management. He talked about this subject on Nick Cohen's podcast Writing from London a couple of years ago.

And he wrote about it on his own blog not long before that. As with planning, a large part of the problem is systemic rather than down to individual delinquency. When it comes to British management, the problem is that there are perverse incentives that lead to mangers not striving to perform better.

Yet, as Chris points out:

Whether it be efforts to weaken trades unions or to "strengthen work incentives", both Labour and Tory governments have for decades seen their task as ensuring an adequate supply of quiescent labour. Ensuring an adequate supply of good management, by contrast, has barely figured as an objective.

It seems that calling for a higher level of growth in the British economy may be a more radical policy than its enthusiasts realise.

Why and how is the DLR being extended to Thamesmead?

Here's Jago Hazzard to explain. Real horrorshow, my droogs.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not subscribe to his YouTube channel?

James Hawes talks about his book The Shortest History of Ireland

On Monday I went to the launch of James Hawes's new book The Shortest History of Ireland. I'm very glad I did, because Hawes gave a lecture on Irish history that taught me an enormous amount. So I'm happy to recommend his book even before I've read it.

You can hear much of what he said in an interview he gave to Oliver Callan on RTE Radio 1. It really is worth a listen

Early on he reveals that at one time the BBC was keen to adapt his novel Speak for England. It's a great shame for Hawes that they didn't, because he would now be feted as The Man Who Foresaw Brexit.

And it's a shame for us, because it would have offered an alternative version of Lord of the Flies. A version in which the prefects and housemasters survive and maintain their authority, and in which, after the boys are rescued, the headmaster returns to Britain and takes over the country.

The Joy of Six 1487

"On this occasion Starmer has taken both the correct and popular position and stuck to it despite relentless attacks from the right. The result is that it is now his opponents, rather than him, who is having to embark on a humiliating U-turn." Adam Bienkov argues that the government should learn from Farage and Badenoch's reversal on Iran.

The Lancet dissects Robert F. Kennedy Jr's year of failure.

Michael Webb and Rebecca Flook say the choices universities and colleges make about AI are political: "The systems now being woven into education are shaped by a remarkably small group of people. Not 'the internet' as the source of training material. Not 'society' influencing the way we use these tools. It’s shaped by a small leadership class in a handful of companies, operating within specific political and economic pressures."

"I lived in a suburb on the very edge of London, far away from Soho’s Piano Bar or the Waterloo WHSmith glimpsed in the video to ‘West End Girls’. I was a lonely boy at the back of the garden. There weren’t out gay people or role models in my white working class neighbourhood, just an expectation that you would be the same as everyone else, and fit in – or else." John Grindrod reveals how Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids.

Parker Henry on Iris Murdoch as a philosopher. It seems to me she is being discovered in this role as her reputation as a novelist fades.

"Two Italian former amateur radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, claimed to have recorded audio from an orbiting capsule in the days before Gagarin made his flight, and it was actually the fourth slice of startling audio released by the pair." Was Yuri Gagarin really the first Soviet cosmonaut? David Crookes considers the theory that the USSR launched earlier, unsuccessful manned missions.

Michael Nyman: Drowning by Numbers (Finale)

Michael Nyman's music makes me happy. Certainly, the only word for this performance by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble and friends is "joyous".

You can visit Noah's Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky​

Embed from Getty Images

Most Europeans who visit the United States go to New York or California, which are liberal, cosmopolitan places very like Europe. But the rest of the country, as I was told when I visited New York myself, isn't like that.

You can say that again. Here's Alexander Bevilacqua writing in the London Review of Books:

In Williamstown, Kentucky​, no small distance from the "mountains of Ararat", the biblical resting place of Noah's Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour's drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. 

A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah's Coffee. Outdoor speakers play music reminiscent of a fantasy video game. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul's Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

Entertainments are on offer: a petting zoo; camel rides; zip lines; virtual reality ‘time travel’. There are flashes of humour: visitors can pose as a biblical patriarch in a cut-out panel; the refreshment stands promise "a flood of refills". Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. 

Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven pairs ‘of every sort’ of animal, then stayed on it during a deluge that lasted forty days and for a further 150 days when the floodwaters prevailed, plus the better part of a year as the waters receded.

He ends on a more secular note:

AiG doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary interpretations of the ark. A Dutch carpenter and creationist called Johan Huibers built his "half-size" ark – 230 feet long – after a dream in which he saw his country "disappearing under an enormous mass of water’" (fifty years earlier, in 1953, the North Sea Flood killed almost two thousand people in the Netherlands). 

In 2010, he sold it to the impresario Aad Peters, who turned it into a travelling gallery of Bible stories. When Peters brought the ark to the UK in 2019, Extinction Rebellion activists boarded the vessel. On one side they hung a giant banner bearing the words: "We need a better plan than this."

What is your favourite TV show that no one else has seen? Gophers!

"What is your favorite TV show that no one else has seen?" asked someone on Bluesky yesterday.

I replied, as I generally do to such questions, with Gophers!'

Reader's voice: Gophers!?

Liberal England replies: Yes, Gophers! Wikipedia puts it very well:

Gophers! is a Channel 4 children's programme about a family of American gophers who move into a new neighbourhood, called Sycamore Heights, living next door to a family of uptight but well-intentioned rabbits, The Burrows.

There were many recurring jokes within this short-lived show such as Arthur Burrows' vegetables planning a rebellion to escape his garden, a mad scientist ferret called Dr Wince, whose ambition was to conquer the world by obtaining a crystal buried in the Gophers' garden with the help of his reptilian servant Sly, and an alien in love with a zucchini determined to get home. Also there were stereotypical "Mexican" cockroaches (dressed in costumes of Mexican peasant revolutionaries of the Mexican Revolution of 1910) who lived in the Gophers' house or trailer park mobile home always trying to steal their food.

The series won the WorldFest Houston Gold Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1990 and was sold to 67 countries. The characters used a mix of animatronic costumes and puppetry.

And when I looked for an image to illustrate this post, I found a whole episode on YouTube.

The Joy of Six 1486

The Secret Barrister argues that Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty: "Restricting trial by jury has been paraded by the government as the only way to tackle the record backlogs and delays in the Crown Courts – caused by years of chronic underfunding and political mismanagement – yet the government has produced not a shred of credible evidence to support this claim, nor is it interested in discovering any, forcing the legislation through Parliament at breakneck speed in the apparent hope of avoiding inconvenient scrutiny."

"The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them." John Oxley criticises the right's response to the Gorton and Denton by-election,

Mihai Andrei explodes the myth that wind farms massacre birds.

"When I talk to students and ask them to tell me the truth, not necessarily what they would tell their teacher, but quietly tell me whether they go on to AI when they’ve got a piece of work to do, they say 'well actually yeah please don’t tell my teacher but yes I do'." Samantha Booth reports that pupils have been confessing their sins to Ian Bauckham, the head of Ofqual.

"His paintings unnerve us as they unnerved their Baroque viewers. Caravaggio didn’t draw but painted directly onto the canvas. He invented a dramatic, overpowering chiaroscuro, a spotlit style he used to freeze the worst moments of his subjects' lives in paint. There are so many decapitations, a frankly weird number of decapitations." Erin Maglaque on the shocking art of Caravaggio.

 Grant McPhee chooses his top 15 wyrd folk albums.

Jonathan Meades on the BBC on the BBC's own buildings

Thanks to Illuminations Media for pointing me to this Jonathan Meades video from 1989.

Couple tried claiming neighbour's land with gnome

"Surrey. It would be Surrey," remarked one of the judges as they made our Headline of the Day Award to BBC News.

He also suggested you seek professional legal advice before attempting to claim your neighbour's land.

Thomas Telford's St Mary Magdalene, Bridgnorth, may face closure

A Bridgnorth church designed by Thomas Telford has serious structural problems, reports the Shropshire Star:

In a statement the church said that the issues are not cosmetic and "go to the heart of whether St Mary's can continue to serve the town".

The statement also says:

St Mary’s Church is one of Bridgnorth’s most cherished buildings used both as a place of worship and a key community venue – but beneath its beautiful exterior, serious structural problems are putting its future at risk.

A recent study led by Oliver Architecture has revealed that without significant investment, the church could face closure within 15 years.

The challenges are fundamental: the flooring requires complete replacement due to extensive dry rot, the heating system is beyond repair, and poor thermal insulation is making the building increasingly difficult to maintain.

Community consultation events will be announced by the church authorities shortly.

St Mary Magdalene's was originally the church for Bridgnorth Castle. The current building was erected between 1792 and 1795. In a typically pragmatic 18th-century move, the church was aligned north–south to make better use of the site and to present a more pleasing prospect to adjoining streets.

Its distinctive tower stands 120ft high and has a clock, eight bells and a copper-covered roof.

Bridgnorth has a second church, St Leonard's. It is no longer used for worship but is often used for concerts. The group of buildings on the approach to it constitute a miniature cathedral close.

Chaos: Down at the Club

John Bromley was a nearly man of Sixties pop. His Manchester-based band played hard-to-get with Mickie Most, with the result that the producer signed Herman's Hermits instead. In 1969 he brought out an album of his McCartneyesque songs, Sing, on which he was backed by the band Les Fleurs de Lys.

The Riff, quotes a now-vanished Facebook post of his about his success as a songwriter for other artists:

English songwriter John Bromley has written over 200 works with over 60 recorded and performed worldwide by major artists such as Shirley Bassey, Sacha Distel, Petula Clark, Richard Harris, Paul Anka ... John Farnham, Jackie De Shannon and the Ace Kefford Stand.

I can't find any well-known songs that he wrote though.

But Bromley did get on Top of the Pops and into the lower reaches of the UK singles chart with Down at the Club. He explains its genesis for It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine:

I took on a part-time role as a tape operator at Advision Studios in Gosfield Street, London. After finishing a late-night recording session with John Anderson’s prog-rock band Yes in 1973, recording engineer Martin Rushent and I recorded a glam rock song called Down at The Club for fun with the free studio time. 

We spent the entire night playing and overdubbing and multi-tracking keyboards, drums, bass, guitars, and vocals, with Martin singing the main vocal. His voice was pretty deep, and because we wanted the vocal to sound like a younger singer, we slowed down the backing track and recorded his vocal at three-quarter speed. 

When we did the final mixdown at full speed, his voice sounded like the singer we wanted on the record, and after the final mixdown, what had initially been a bit of fun sounded pretty commercial!

I took the recording to Warner Brothers A&R man Martin Wyatt the next day, and he loved it. He asked who the band was, and I just made a name up on the spot. The non-existent band became a ghost band called Chaos. We got a £1,000 advance from Warner Brothers A&R, and the track was released as a single by Polydor.

The single got a lot of play from Radio 1 and Radio Luxembourg, and quite unexpectedly and unbelievably, I took a call from the producer of Top of the Pops asking if Chaos was available to appear on TOTP in next week’s show. It was a brilliant opportunity but not without a few problems, the first being there wasn’t actually a band...

We cobbled together a bunch of musician friends and co-opted Tony Head as the frontman, deciding to use the master tape to mime to when the show was recorded. (We got away with it.) After the show was broadcast, the single scraped into the UK Top 50 but didn’t get any higher.

Down at the Club is very 1973 - you can hear Slade, Gary Glitter and Wizzard in there. But maybe, as with the last-named and The Glitter Band, it was a song about rock and roll more than it was a rock and roll song. Still, many worse singles made the charts that year.