In August 1941 George Orwell stopped writing his wartime diary and only resumed in March 1942. What might have happened in those six months?
Working for the BBC as a radio producer in the India Section of the Eastern Service,
Orwell was employed to produce British propaganda to subvert the growing demand for India’s Independence.
He learns of Churchill’s plan to partition India and meets Guy Burgess, later one of the Cambridge spies, who was also working at the BBC.
London was experiencing a welcome lull in the Blitz but the streets were still full of hidden dangers. One of Orwell’s young Indian assistants goes missing.
Inspector Charles Percy of Scotland Yard suspects Orwell is involved in her disappearance.
It was during this period that Orwell developed many of the ideas and themes that were later to be found in his famous novel 1984.