Orwell Notes Hitler's Rigidity of Mind

It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anyth...

 The Emergence of the Week Began the Scientific Mind

The making of our week was another forward step in man's mastery of the world, in his reach toward science. The week was man's own cluster, not dictated by the visible forces of nature, for the planetary influences were invisible. By seeking astral regularities, by imagining that regularly recurring forces at a distance, forces that could be judged only by their effects, might govern the world, mankind was preparing a new arsenal of thought, an escape from the prison of Again-and-Again. The p...

 Sifting Through Photographs of Our Ancestors to See Evolu...

Find a picture of yourself. Now take a picture of your father and place it on top. Then find a picture of his father, your grandfather. Then place on top of that a picture of your grandfather's father, your great-grandfather. You may not have ever met any of your great-grandfathers. I never met any of mine, but I know that one was a country schoolmaster, one a country doctor, one a forester in British India, and one a lawyer, greedy for cream, who died rock-climbing in old age. Still, even if...