Desert Aunt
Life In A Desert Of Death
Nick Hunt | Noema | 30th January 2025
Journey to the vanished inland Aral Sea of Uzbekistan, which began shrinking in the 1960s when the two rivers that fed it were diverted by the Soviets to irrigate cotton farms. This rapid drying out created the Earth's newest desert. It looks like the setting of Mad Max and became what ecologists call a "sacrifice zone". But life is returning, in the form of hardy shrubs and tiny squiggling crustaceans (3,900 words)
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Life With My Aunt Avril
Richard Blair | Orwell Society | 27th October 2011
George Orwell's son describes his childhood. Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted their son at his birth in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died. Some of Orwell's friends suggested he "unadopt" his son, but he and his sister Avril refused. They moved to the Hebridean island of Jura while Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, to a house with no telephone that was eight miles from the nearest proper road (6,800 words)
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