Subliminal text

ALEXANDER McKay's letter (18 February) about the Englishness of George Orwell is interesting. That writer seemed to me for many years to be Scottish in outlook, and it was only afterwards that the significance of his rejection of his antecedents, under great psychological pressure at his English preparatory school and later at Eton, became clear to me. His experience of imperialism in Burma, poverty in London and Paris, and service in the Spanish Civil War inspired his socialism.

However, his first commercial success, Animal Farm, was a rolling back of socialism and, in part, possibly a subconscious rejection of it. His last major book, 1984, was an even greater example of such subliminal writing. He returned to Scotland, his rejected country, and wrote about brain-washing in a great empire, surely symbolically based on his own school experiences?

IAIN WD FORDE

Main Street

Scotlandwell, Kinross-shire