"There was a writer already working on a novel which should present the ultimate austerity, whose properties he took from the years of the British peace. This was Orwell, whom I saw briefly at the Mandrake Club, which specialized in dubious gin flavoured with cloves and a large number of chessboards. It was run by a man called Boris. I had brought back with me from Gilbraltar a number of tins of Victory cigarettes, which were a very briefly maintained army ration and quite unsmokable. But I paid taxi fares with them. orwell’s non-committal eye took in the tin I had on my table at the Mandrake, which became the Chestnut Tree Café, but [he] did not accept a cigarette, preferring to roll his own. But his description of Victory cigarettes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is accurate, and his Victory gin is Boris’s. ... The physical reality of his prophecy is, for me, set firmly in the forties, though it makes me shudder to remember that I pondered over chess moves in the Chestnut Tree Café. Orwell’s power to ensour things was considerable. ... The term Orwellian is wrongly applied to the future. It was the miserable forties that were Orwellian."
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Anthony Burgess, biographies
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