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Without the efforts of Peter Davison, who has died aged 95, our knowledge of the life and works of George Orwell would be immeasurably the poorer. In an editorial engagement that extended for nearly three-and-a-half decades, Davison turned himself into a one-man Orwell industry: his 20-volume George Orwell: The Complete Works (1998) is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of late 20th-century publishing.

This achievement is all the more remarkable in that Davison’s career as an Orwell scholar did not begin until he was in his mid-50s. At an age when most academics are settling into comfortable retirement, he was working eight hours a day on the voluminous output of a man whom he regarded as the greatest writer of his age.

Much of the author’s work may have fallen into public ownership in the UK, but there are more restrictions on its use remaining than you might expect, explains his biographer

George Orwell died at University College Hospital, London, on 21 January 1950 at the early age of 46. This means that unlike such long-lived contemporaries as Graham Greene (died 1991) or Anthony Powell (died 2000), the vast majority of his compendious output (21 volumes to date) is newly out of copyright as of 1 January. Naturally, publishers � who have an eye for this kind of opportunity � have long been at work to take advantage of the expiry date and the next few months are set to bring a glut of repackaged editions.

The Oxford University Press is producing World’s Classics versions of the major books and there are several bulky compendia about to hit the shelves � see, for example, the Flame Tree Press’s . I have to declare an interest myself, having spent much of the spring lockdown preparing annotated editions of Orwell’s six novels, to be issued at the rate of two a year before the appearance of my new Orwell biography (a successor to 2003’s Orwell: The Life) in 2023. As for the tide of non-print spin-offs, an hit cyberspace in mid-December.

When Trump took office, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by 9,500%. This astute study locates the origins of the novel and traces its life within pop culture

Most Orwell biography is, at heart, an exercise in teleology: a reverse journey through his life and times that begins with the achievement of Nineteen Eighty-Four and then works backwards, in an attempt to establish exactly what it was about the intervening years that impelled him to write it in the way that he did. In this highly astute study, Dorian Lynskey locates the origins of the novel � now celebrating its 70th anniversary � in the six months its author spent in the first half of 1937 fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war.

It was here in Catalonia, Lynskey argues, that the stanchions of Big Brother’s nightmare world � the disregard for objective truth, the rewriting of the past and the routine suppression of dissent � slid inexorably into place. And, as he makes clear, the “Spanish Beans� that Orwell spilled in his essay of 1942 affected their spiller personally. Having enrolled in the Trotskyist Poum militia rather than the Marxist International Brigades, he was immediately suspect: when the war descended into faction fighting and the Soviet hit-squads arrived in Barcelona, he barely escaped with his life. If the corruption of the left is such a feature of his later writing it is because he was a victim of it himself.

From Shelley to dandies to Orwell (perhaps) � public schools have produced rebels as well as shoring up elitism

For a scholarly study of the British educational system’s upper tier, Gilded Youth is unusually rife with tension. Much of its air of unease is down to an underlying conflict, in this case the stand-off between James Brooke-Smith’s commitment to professional objectivity and the personal prejudice boiling up beneath it.

The commitment to impartiality is elegantly set down in a chapter about the “secret life� of the Victorian schoolboy. “It is wrong to impose one’s own values on the past, to see history only through the lens of one’s own intellectual categories and moral standards,� Brooke-Smith insists. Yet it soon becomes clear that he was asked to leave the public school at which he fetched up in his mid-teens, hates the institution that nurtured him like poison and would like to see its playing fields dug up for cabbages.

Literary scholar dedicated to restoring the reputation of the Victorian novelist George Gissing

Few literary scholars have laboured quite so devotedly in the service of a single subject as Pierre Coustillas, who has died aged 88. Certainly, the fervour he brought to his half-century campaign to restore the reputation of the Victorian novelist went well beyond the usual boundaries of scholarly interest.

As well as bringing out new editions of Gissing’s works, co-founding the , staging academic conferences in his memory and producing a mammoth three-volume , Coustillas also assembled a collection of books from his hero’s library and acquired pieces of his furniture. So relentlessly did talk of Gissing’s life, work and opinions cascade through the Coustillas household that his daughter’s first words are supposed to have been “Morley Roberts� � the name of an obscure professional crony of Gissing’s from the 1890s.

In the 1960s, writers such as BJ Johnson, Ann Quin and Bob Cobbing were ripping up the rules of fiction, fighting the establishment - and each other. What, if anything, of their legacy lives on?

Of all the curious artefacts gathering dust in the , one of the very weirdest dates from an evening in 1969. ’s guest on his late-night radio show is the sound poet Bob Cobbing. Stationed alongside is the Scottish monologist Ivor Cutler. Urged on by his captivated host, Cobbing plays the tape of a recording made with his French collaborator François Dufrêne. What follows is a kind of aural collage from the very edge of language: repetitive pantings, groans, sighs, whispers and primal gibberish. After it judders to a halt, Peel turns to the somewhat nonplussed Cutler to inquire: has he ever tried anything similar? “You mean making a noise?� Cutler sceptically lobs back.

As the spectacle of Cobbing in full shamanistic flow on a Radio 1 pop show confirms, the literary 1960s was an era in which, for the first time in nearly 40 years, the avant garde veered dangerously close to the mainstream. It was an age in which (sometimes rather to their surprise) experimental writers found themselves contracted to major commercial publishers, in which novels could cheerfully be issued in random fragments under the cover of a cardboard box (BS Johnson’s ), and ambitious debutants embark on their careers with the assumption that, as Eva Figes once put it: “I and a few other writers with similar ideas could change the face of English fiction.�

BS Johnson phoned AS Byatt after the publication of her well-received second novel to tell her she was ‘no competition�

Quin's 1964 debut Berg is like watching Match of the Day when someone has removed the ball

The 500 or so densely packed pages of (2015), the first volume of memoirs, ended with our hero in his 41st year, successfully embarked on the dual-track career of academic-cum-comic novelist in a decade when both those professions promised far more in the way of financial security than they do now. As literary autobiographies go, it was a rather peculiar exercise and the peculiarity lay not in any procedural weirdness or beetle-browed obsession with settling scores, but in a reluctance to entertain the notion of its subject’s personal myth.

For literary memoirs, a brisk survey of the genre insists, are hardly ever about what really happens to the people whose names appear on their jackets. They are far more likely to be about what those people think happens to them or how they wish to be regarded by the readers who buy their work. Anthony Powell, for example, and despite compelling evidence to the contrary, always imagined himself to be “a poor boy made good�. Lodge, on the other hand, offered the highly unusual spectacle of a creative writer simply setting down, with sometimes disarming lack of guile, how he had come to be the person he was.

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There is a wonderfully Pooterish description of his sidling into a showing of Deep Throat in mid-1970s Toulouse

What food did Samuel Pepys bury in his backyard? Which dystopian novelist had a ‘hopeless� love affair with cricket? And how many words did Enid Blyton write per day? Try your hand at our Christmas quiz

“There is no such passion in human nature as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.� In which classic book does this confident assertion appear?

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

According to his diary entry for 4 September 1666, which luxury item did Samuel Pepys bury in his garden for safety as the great fire of London approached?

A joint of aged smoked beef

A parmesan cheese

His best china plate

In which classic children’s novel does the heroine get her best friend roaring drunk?

Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery

The Jolliest Term on Record by Angela Brazil

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Who said “I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them�?

GB Shaw

Bridget Jones

Nora Ephron

Which Thomas Hardy hero inadvertently serves the girl of his dreams a well-boiled slug?

Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders

Angel Clare in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd

In Jane Eyre, what is the breed of Mr Rochester’s dog, Pilot?

Irish wolfhound

Newfoundland

Yorkshire terrier

In which story by Flaubert does the famous parrot appear?

“Hé°ù´Ç»å¾±²¹²õâ€�

“Un Coeur Simple�

“La Légende de Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier�

A boy prays to a polecat-ferret in the darkly funny Saki short story “Sredni Vashtar�. Which British writer-director turned the story into a film?

Stephen Fry

Patrick Marber

Andrew Birkin

Which philosopher asked why we should concern ourselves with cats, when they have no sign of the zodiac named after them?

Voltaire

Francis Bacon

Jean-Paul Sartre

In Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, what other pets are kept by young Hedvig Ekdal in the loft?

Birch mice

Wolverines

Rabbits

What’s the name of the wood at the heart of Robert Holdstock’s fantasy cycle about an English forest that contains time as well as space?

Oak-Apple

Instar

Mythago

Along which river does Alice Oswald poetically “sleepwalk� in a long poem of 2009?

Dart

Severn

Stour

With what creatures does Gawain battle in his winter journey across England to meet the Green Knight?

Dragons and ogres

Lynxes and griffons

Worms and wodwos

What is the title of Iris Murdoch’s 1978 Booker prize-winning novel about Charles Arrowby, a playwright and director?

The Sea

The Sea, the Sea

Down to the Sea

Into which poet’s past does Andrew Greig go fishing in At the Loch of the Green Corrie?

Norman MacCaig

Hugh MacDiarmid

Nan Shepherd

Which novelist stole one of their book titles from a composer?

Joseph Roth

Ian McEwan

AS Byatt

Penelope Lively

Which opera by Richard Strauss makes the hero of which Iris Murdoch novel puke?

Feuersnot/The Nice and the Good

Der Rosenkavalier/The Black Prince

Ariadne auf Naxos/Nuns and Soldiers

Everyone knows that Helen Schlegel stole Leonard Bast’s umbrella after Beethoven’s fifth symphony. But what was next on the programme?

Brahms, Vier Ernste Lieder

Bizet, L’Arlésienne

Berlioz, Les Nuits d’Été

Which recording finally calls Joachim Ziemssen back from the dead in The Magic Mountain?

The Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde

“Va, pensiero� from Nabucco

Valentin’s prayer from Gounod’s Faust

Which opera does Proust’s Mme de Cambremer think finer than Parsifal “because in Parsifal the most beautiful things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodic phrases, outworn by the very fact of being melodic?�

Schoenberg’s Erwartung

Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande

In which novel do Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons make a joint appearance?

Ali Smith’s How to Be Both

Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory

Ian McEwan’s Solar

Which Italian artist’s style figures in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red?

Gentile Bellini

Umberto Boccioni

Michelangelo Pistoletto

The lost painting in Hannah Rothschild’s The Improbability of Love is by:

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Jean-Antoine Watteau

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Which of these artists was/is also a novelist?

Ford Madox Brown

Jake Chapman

Vanessa Bell

Which of these is called a “poisonous book� in The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater

Household Management by Mrs Beeton

Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Which celebrated dystopian novelist confessed to a “hopeless� teenage love affair with cricket? a) b) c)

HG Wells

Aldous Huxley

George Orwell

In Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which football team wins the FA Cup 5-4 having been a goal down on four occasions?

Macclesfield Town

Leicester City

West Bromwich Albion

Dink Heckler, in Martin Amis’s London Fields, is the South African number seven in which sport?

Tennis

Darts

Cross country running

Which British writer drew on his experiences of playing rugby league for Leeds in his first novel?

John Braine

David Storey

JB Priestley

The hero of Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes is a fan of which American football team?

Green Bay Packers

Chicago Bears

New York Giants

What does Edith in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac wear on her aborted wedding day?

A little black dress worn with a double strand of her grandmother’s pearls

A Chanel suit copied by a Polish dressmaker

A white linen dress purchased and altered to fit her at Selfridges

Who designed the dresses of Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes?

Fortuny

Worth

Patou

In the 17th-century ballad “Tam Lin�, where did Janet tie her kirtle green?

Round her waist

Above her knee

Round her shoulders

In Middlemarch, what throws Dorothea Brooke’s beauty into relief?

Poor dress

A glimpse of her wrists

A low neckline

When Rose marries Pinkie in Brighton Rock, what new garment does she buy?

New shoes

A new corset

A new mackintosh

What is What-a-Mess the puppy’s real name?

Ian

Scamper

Prince Amir of Kinjan

Which children’s writer did GK Chesterton liken to Jane Austen and say that he “felt like a male intruder� on her books� grounds?

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Louisa May Alcott

Charlotte Yonge

Who named the hero of her most famous book after her (probable) younger lover at the time (and dedicated the book to him)?

E Nesbit

Richmal Crompton

Joan G Robinson

How many words did Enid Blyton write per day, at her peak?

3,000

10,000

15,000

Who lived on Klickitat Street?

Clever Polly

The little wooden horse

Ramona Quimby

Which Roman writer addressed a poem to his lover’s sparrow?

Catullus

Propertius

Ovid

Which bird’s nesting season is characterised by halycon days, according to the poet Simonides?

Hoopoe

Kingfisher

Nightjar

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the designer Daedalus is so jealous of his nephew that he flings him from the heights of Minerva’s citadel. Minerva transforms him into which ground-loving bird? (Clue: as a bird, the boy keeps his mother’s name, Perdix.)

Quail

Partridge

Pheasant

In I, Claudius, the narrator’s future ascent to the imperial throne is foretold in an omen: an eagle drops something into his lap. What is that something?

A wolf cub

A snake

A hare

Rosemary Sutcliff’s story The Eagle of the Ninth took its inspiration from a real Roman bronze eagle � probably not actually a legionary standard, but never mind. In which museum can it be seen?

Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Reading Museum

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

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The first question worth asking of Helen Smith’s A-grade biography of Edward Garnett (1868�1937) is just how many manuscripts passed across the desk of this publishers� reader in his lifetime. Very little hard data is vouchsafed, but Smith estimates that, in 1917, John Lane was forwarding him between 400 and 500 items a year. A decade later, the contents of the weekly parcel sent to his house in Kent is put at eight to 10. All this suggests that in a 50-year career, beginning with the firm of T Fisher Unwin and ending with Jonathan Cape, Garnett may have worked his way through 20,000 unpublished novels � 150m words, say, forming a pile that, if laid end to end, would stretch from one side of central London to the other.

Naturally there were times when this decades-long sojourn in what called the Valley of the Shadow of Books became oppressive and Garnett began to feel that he was pouring his immortal spirit down the drain a pint at a time. A rather plaintive letter survives from November 1910 in which he informs John Galsworthy: “I get very low sometimes as to the secondhand sort of existence that is implied in the game and its sequelae.� But there was gold lurking among the dross, and a list of the famous names that he turned up in the slush pile would be enough to fill a literary Who’s Who. The Nobel-winning Galsworthy, Conrad and the Lawrences (DH and TE) all benefited from his advice, and even in his 60s he could be found busily annotating the apprentice work of such up-and-coming youngsters as and Henry Green.

Well-researched and neatly written, The Uncommon Reader is, necessarily, the study of a milieu

In 2003, when the Guardian ran my admiring profile of the writer Gordon Williams, the piece was headed simply Gordon Who? It was a good question, for by the tail-end of his career Williams, who has died aged 83, was an elusive figure, wary of the publicity customarily associated with the literary life.

In his day, on the other hand, he was a versatile and prolific performer in a variety of high-profile genres. Not many Grub Street irregulars can boast, as he was able to do in the half-decade between 1966 and 1971, of having had one novel shortlisted for the and while carrying out ghostwriting assignments for an England football captain.

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