The diaries of the novelist George Orwell are to published online as a daily blog.

'The first entry will be posted on August 9, exactly 70 years to the day since the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four wrote it.'

'Prof Jean Seaton, the director of the Orwell prize, said: "Orwell's diaries are eyewitness accounts from the frontlines of the 1930s: unemployment, gossip, fascism, communism - and chicken farming.

"All of these issues - at home and abroad - are seen through the passionate/dispassionate eye of a great writer and a decent man." '

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