George Orwell and the whiff of genius

Orwell often lived in places with no washing facilities, and in the company of chickens and goats. He loved farmyard smells: cows grazing in a meadow were scented ‘like a distillation of vanilla and fresh hay’. Sutherland thinks it significant that there are no animals in Nineteen Eighty-Four — apart from the rats, of which the author’s phobia was as intense as Winston Smith’s.

From George Orwell and the whiff of genius