If, at some time in the late 1930s, a well-known author had given the government a list of writers and other public intellectuals who he thought could not be trusted to counter Nazi propaganda, this would have been regarded as unremarkable and, indeed, rather praiseworthy. No one would still be discussing it decades and decades later. How different it is when the ‘betrayed’ apologists for totalitarianism are communists at the height of the Stalin era.

Here’s a piece on the ‘scandal’ over George Orwell’s decision to give the British government a list of people he thought were pro-communist or worse.

One of the names was, interestingly enough, our old friend Walter Duranty.