AustLit

'Eric Blair died for want of a typist. Self-exiled to a remote Scottish island and hollowed out by tuberculosis, he quailed at the prospect of typing a clean manuscript copy of his just-completed novel. Despite an SOS to his publishers, no typist eventuated. If he were to meet his end-of-1948 deadline, he’d have to do the job himself. And so he did, propped up in bed with the typewriter on a tea tray. But three days after typing “THE END”, Blair suffered his final collapse.' (Introduction)

'The Last Man in Europe, a lean novel of artful mimicry, was the working title of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four before it was published in 1949. Melbourne writer and political adviser Dennis Glover seems to have absorbed all Orwell was and yearned to be by the time he came to the ordeal of his final, invalid years spent writing  that  last  word  on  our  political future.' (Introduction)