Of course, on the question of the relationship of clear writing and clear thinking, George Orwell is indispensible. And so it is indeed fitting that my friend Peter Hitchens has won the Orwell prize, England’s most prestigious writing award. Go, fight, win.
The judges said: “In choosing this year’s winner, we went back to Orwell. In one of his essays, he wrote of Charles Dickens: ‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page … It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’ It is with this in mind that we award the Orwell Prize to Peter Hitchens.”
And like I said the other day, Canon has his new book.