>Rewriting the end of "Animal Farm" is just one example of the often absurd
>lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, "The Cultural
>Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press) by
>Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last
>summer, the book will appear here next month.
Next month? I have a copy already, and I'm about half way through it. Quite a fine book, though slightly marred by the author's occasional bouts of anticommunism. The passage on Orwell is pretty damning - Orwell's famous jottings about his politically suspect friends and colleagues that he handed over to British intelligence also included petty comments about their vulgarity, Jewishness, and homosexuality. The "homosexual" charge recurs several times, applied to Stephen Spender among others. What is it about the Cold Warrior's paranoid equivalence of Red and queer? Has that ever been explored in depth?
Doug