How did George Orwell die?
How the Poor Die
In summer 1946, Orwell decamped to Jura, an island to the west of Scotland. A boating accident did little for his health. In December 1947 he was in hospital in Glasgow. Tuberculosis was diagnosed and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan. After treatment, Orwell was able to return to Jura by the end of July 1948.
Robert Conquest
In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached George Orwell for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. Orwell's list, discovered after her death in 2002, included "Guardian" and "Observer" journalists, as well as E. H. Carr and Charlie Chaplin. Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems.
One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of Donald Maclean, one of the Philby spy ring, who fled to Russia with Guy Burgess in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, and went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems. At the IRD Conquest wrote various papers which sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was to be elaborated in "The Great Terror". Other papers were ""Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory"", and on ""United Fronts – a Communist Tactic"". Much of IRD works was later published in the Soviet Studies Series.