Word: gollancz
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...late leftist publisher Vic tor Gollancz subsidized The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell's classic report on wretched British mining conditions. It turned out to be a hot coal indeed. In a pusillanimous preface, Gollancz deplored Orwell's "general dislike of Russia" and added with evident shock: "He even commits the curious indiscretion of referring to Russian commissars as 'half-gramophones, half-gangsters...
Died. Sir Victor Gollancz, 73, British publisher and idealist of the left, founder in 1928 of London's immensely successful Victor Gollancz Ltd. (among his authors: Daphne du Maurier, George Orwell, John le Carré, Kingsley Amis), who was born into an orthodox Jewish family, but chose instead to live out what he regarded as "the Christian ethic," becoming an ardent socialist and Labor Party pamphleteer in his politics and a humanitarian in all else, espousing such diverse causes as the abolition of capital punishment, postwar relief for Germany, aid for Arab refugees of the Arab-Israeli...
...Similar reasoning prompted Britain's Jewish publisher, Victor Gollancz, to suggest that Eichmann be sent to a kibbutz (collective farm) in Israel, "where he would live in an atmosphere of Christian (or, rather, Jewish) love, and he might learn the right way of living and repent his appalling sins...
...serious about it was a rare thing in those days -he was quickly tapped for great things in the world of left-wing propaganda. He went on his pilgrimage to the poor on commission from the influential Left Book Club, run by a notable socialist triumvirate - Publisher Victor Gollancz, London School of Economics Professor Harold J. Laski and John ( The Coming Struggle for Power) Strachey. When Orwell finished his book, his sponsors found that they were getting more than they bargained...
...Empire; it has not turned out that way. But Orwell's polemics against bearded, fruit-juice-drinking pacifists, cranks, snobs, snob-bolsheviks, cowards in the socialist movement is devastating stuff, and this lends sharp irony to the book today. With great acumen the present publishers have reprinted Victor Gollancz's original foreword, in which the socialist publisher apologizes for the heretical opinions of his socialist writer. Says Gollancz in shocked tones: "He even commits the curious indiscretion of referring to Russian commissars as 'half-gramophones, half-gangsters.' " Such indiscretions should have been more common at that...