Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

Of all radical and left-wing publications in Britain, daily newspapers, weekly magazines or monthly journals, I doubt if any of them can seriously match the extraordinary 70-year history of the weekly Tribune – which, God knows how, still rattles on.

In all that time it has contained pretty well everything that socialists and most radicals wanted to read, admire, even worship, while of course in the same breath friendly critics would never hesitate to castigate the paper, with careful fury, for failing to match their still higher objectives of a left-wing ‘New Jerusalem’.

At the other end of the political spectrum Tribune tended to be regarded with the derision and odium reserved for what was seen as revolutionary naivete or even worse, downright political teachery.

Yet despite these predictable political reactions most reasoned judges would always salute the journal’s remarkable ability to attract an astonishing range of exceptionally talented writers – most of them paid in buttons.

No writer stands taller in that special salon than George Orwell – who indeed worked for Tribune while he was also writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four.

Orwell started writing his regular weekly column in the paper “As I Please” on December 3 1943 and continued, with a short break through till April 1947.

During the whole of that time he was also busily working on his two masterpieces. That point alone surely establishes the case about the special nature of the Tribune-Orwell relationship.
Yet it is still only part of a remarkable story which this book brings to life as perhaps no other, so far, has been able to do. It is a tribute to the publishers and to Tribune itself that Paul Anderson has been able to edit such a superb compendium of Orwell’s writings at a crucial stage in his life.

A word then about the birth years of this unique weekly agitational journal. The paper emerged during the critical years of the 1930s – a period when Hitler and Mussolini stalked Europe, when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists invaded the streets of London and other major British cities with racialist incitement and when Orwell went off to Spain to fight with the International Brigade against Franco.

It was also the period when Neville Chamberlain had taken over from Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, and the Labour Party and trade unions were divided and confused about how to tackle the growing crisis of poverty and unemployment at home and fascism across the channel.

That is when Tribune was born – January 1 1937. It was financed by two Labour MPs – the Christian socialist Sir Stafford Cripps, probably the country’s most renowned (and wealthiest) radical barrister who was effectively leader of the Labour left and MP for Bristol, and George Strauss, a wealthy businessman who was Labour MP for Lambeth.

Together they provided £18,000 (nearly a £1 million in current money) as a launch fund for Tribune along with an additional annual subsidy of £5,000 from Cripps. Around them were the names of virtually all the most prominent socialists of the time – Aneurin Bevan (who became editor of Tribune and a close friend of Orwell) and his wife Jennie Lee, Victor Gollancz, Harold Laski, a young Michael Foot, Raymond Postgate etc.

It was this band of left-wing intellectuals that attracted George Orwell on his return from the Spanish Civil war. He began writing articles for the paper in 1939 on the outbreak of World War II but didn’t begin his regular column until 1943 by which time Nye Bevan had made him literary editor of Tribune.

An inspired appointment for which Orwell was given the then majestic salary of £500 a year – effectively paid for by Cripps. Orwell always fought for the opportunity to write as he chose which is why he was never at ease working for the BBC before he joined Tribune where Nye Bevan encouraged him to write with complete independence by providing him a platform – his “As I Please”column.

It would be invidious and even misleading to snatch, at random, an example from the 80 columns that Orwell wrote before his last in April 1947 when he left Tribune, less than three years before he died, to concentrate on his historic novels.

The Orwell columns covered everything – music, literature, poetry, wartime behaviour, social mannerisms, the weather, the absurdity of the press (especially its ownership) – indeed the entire human comedy (as Balzac might have suggested) and, of course politics.

If I have to select one – just for the hell of it – then I will, querulously, pick No 78 published on March 21 1947. Why? Because I sense that he was already well into his remarkable Nineteen Eighty Four by then and I can sense a foretaste of what is to come in Column No 78. I will say no more; just read it – and, of course, the rest as well.

Michael Foot, Observer

Books of the year feature

Since Tribune may be reticent in blowing its own trumpet and since the Observer has strangely suggested that George Orwell was adept at blowing his own, all such contradictions may be swept away for ever by the new comprehensive volume, Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 (Politico's £19.99). It is compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, a former Tribune editor whose special insights into Orwell's genius make this particular volume the very best on the subject.

Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

This volume of George Orwell's writings for Tribune marks the seventieth anniversary of the left-wing weekly. Orwell left the BBC (describing it as "halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum") in 1943, becoming Tribune's literary editor and beginning his “As I Please” column that would run until 1947. In an introduction that renders the nuances of political rivalries on the Left positively pellucid, Paul Anderson, himself an erstwhile Tribune editor, explains that Stafford Cripps launched the paper in 1937 to support his popular front campaign: by Orwell's time, the nominal editorship had passed to Aneurin Bevan.

Tribune editors and readers often disagreed with Orwell (letters attacked him both for being too lowbrow and too highbrow, obsessed with politics and indifferent to them), but Orwell, who knew already that a society which permitted differences of opinion was the only kind worth living in, found this only civilized. Assembling pieces spread across six-volumes of Peter Davison's Complete Works. Anderson's compilation usefully picks out (and edits superbly) a particular thread in Orwell's huge output. Unlike his broadcast commentaries to India, “As I Please” was not concerned with day-to-day events but with broader political thinking: half-inside, half-outside the whale. Warning against the political control of discourse, blanket praise for the Soviet Union and anti-German hysteria, Orwell worked out in plain language the great themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. If he abandoned his early hopes that the war would effect a socialist revolution, he never doubted that people would act properly if they only understood.

Orwell's biographer, Bernard Crick, counted 232 topics in the eighty “As I Please”s. Typically combining subjects such as historiography and turned-up trouser-ends. the columns have a quirky, commonplace-book feel. Their author comes across as temperate, meticulous, preachy, humorous, occasionally (as when considering the use of "infer" for "imply") splenetic: a decent. Dickens-reading, trivia-appreciating, hobby-horse-riding, very English old buffer. When he wrote the last of them, Orwell was forty-four.