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story of his effort to get Animal Farm circulated clandestinely in Eastern Europe. Ms. Kirwan was close to his heart also, and some defenders of Orwell have kindly suggested that this, together with his much-etiolated physical condition, may have led to a moment of weakness. I find this defense both sentimental and improbable. He told her what he would have told anyone, and what he said in print whenever the opportunity afforded itself, which was that many presentable leftists of good reputation were not to be trusted when it came to the seductions of Moscow. On April 6 he wrote to Richard Rees asking him to find and forward his “quarto notebook with a pale-bluish cardboard cover,” in which could be found “a list of crypto-Communists & fellow-travellers which I want to bring up to date.” This in itself shows that Orwell had not originally drawn up the list at the behest of the state. No doubt there was another notebook with the names of the old Nazi sympathizers and potential collaborators, but no matter. Orwell is not today being impeached for keeping lists, merely for keeping them on the wrong people.
    The incurable inanity of British officialdom and “official secrecy” means that the list of thirty-five names given to Celia Kirwan is stillnot open to our scrutiny. The Public Record Office states demurely and fatuously that “a document has been withheld by the Foreign Office.” It was at one point conceivable that this measure was taken to protect living people from Orwell’s posthumous opinion; even that absurd pretext must now have decayed with time. However, we have the notebook if not the “update” and we do not require official permission to make up our own minds. III
    The list certainly illustrates Orwell’s private resentments and eccentricities. Very little of it, in point of fact, materializes Rees’s confirmation that “this was a sort of game we played—discussing who was a paid agent of what and estimating to what lengths of treachery our favourite bêtes noires would be prepared to go.” To be exact, only one person is ever accused of being an agent, and even there the qualifying words “almost certainly” are applied. This was Peter Smolka, alias Smollett, a former Beaverbrook newspaper executive and holder of the OBE, who was the very official in the Ministry of Information who had put pressure on Jonathan Cape to drop Animal Farm. It has since been conclusively established that Smolka was indeed an agent of Soviet security; this represents a match of 100 percent between Orwell’s allegation of direct foreign recruitment and the known facts. As he phrased it rather mildly in his letter to Celia Kirwan, in which he enclosed his list, it wasn’t “very sensational and I don’t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don’t know . . . If it had been done earlier it would have stopped people like Peter Smollett worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they were probably able to do us a lot of harm.” The “us” here is the democratic left.
    On the very same day, Orwell wrote to Richard Rees, saying thatjust because a certain Labour MP was a friend of the flagrant and notorious Konni Zilliacus, this did not prove he was “a crypto.” He added: “It seems to me very important to attempt to gauge people’s subjective feelings, because otherwise one can’t predict their behaviour in situations where the results of certain actions are clear even to a self-deceiver. . . . The whole difficulty is to decide where each person stands, & one has to treat each case individually.” The staffers of Senator Joseph McCarthy did not possess even the inklings of this discrimination.
    Few of the thumbnail sketches run to more than a dozen or so freehand and laconic words. And many of them stand the test of time remarkably well. Who could object to the summary