Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of George Orwell:

Eric Arthur Blair died suddenly in London on 21 January 1950 at the age of forty-six, succumbing to the tuberculosis that had plagued him for the last three years of his life.

That is not quite right. Orwell was tubercular from an early age. Writing of his prep-school days: “I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung which was not discovered till many years later. Hence I not only had a chronic cough, but running was a torment to me.” Things certainly got much worse in those last three years, though. His habit of chain-smoking home-rolled cigarettes, made with the coarsest shag he could find, while living in a drafty stone house on the damp side of Scotland, probably didn’t help.