It is well known that George Orwell kept a diary, they were published in the 20-volume Complete Works and excerpts from his wartime diary were included in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Now trustees for the Orwell Prize have decided that they will post the writers diaries online one day at a time as the writer had penned them himself.

It seems like a neat idea, and according to The Telegraph Orwell would have been a blogger himself had he lived in the 21st century. Suggesting that while he was a private person he still had “the journalist’s urge to record and publish whatever was in his mind or had caught his eye.”

He delighted in trivia: “C, of my section of the Home Guard, a poulterer by trade but at present dealing in meat of all kinds, yesterday bought 20 zebras which are being sold off by the zoo. Only for dog-meat, presumably, not human consumption. It seems rather a waste” (April 24, 1941). His Tribune column, “As I Please”, could switch from comments on international politics to reflections about the drudgery of washing-up. And he was happy to instruct readers on the correct way to make a pot of tea.