25 June 1903. Eric Arthur Blair born to Richard Walmesley Blair and his wife, Ida, in Motihari, Bengal.
1904. Ida Blair returns to England with Eric and her daughter Marjorie. A second daughter, Avril, is born in 1908. The family settles at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
20 May 1910. Death of King Edward VII and accession of George V.
1911–1916. Boarder at St Cyprian’s, a preparatory school at Eastbourne, Sussex.
28 July 1914. Beginning of First World War.
8 March 1917. Start of Russian Revolution.
1917–1921. King’s Scholar at Eton College, Berkshire.
11 November 1918. End of First World War.
1922–1927. Serves in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Resigns while on leave in England in the autumn of 1927.
January 1924. First Labour government takes office in UK.
3 May 1926. UK General Strike.
1927–1932. Variously engaged in tramping excursions in the English Home Counties, staying with his parents in Southwold, Suffolk, living in a working-class district of Paris, and school-teaching. In November 1932 decides to change his name to ‘George Orwell’.
24–29 October 1929. Wall Street Crash.
19 September 1931. UK goes off the Gold Standard.
27 October 1931. Landslide General Election victory for Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government.
9 January 1933. Publishes his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London. While teaching at Fray’s College, Uxbridge, Middlesex, is taken seriously ill with pneumonia. Returns to Southwold to recuperate.
30 January 1933. Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
4 March 1933. Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes US President.
October 1934. Publishes first novel, Burmese Days.
November 1934. Moves to London to work part-time in a Hampstead bookshop.
11 March 1935. Publishes second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter.
January to March 1936. Travels in the north of England to collect material for a book on the depressed areas.
20 January 1936. Death of King George V and accession of Edward VIII.
7 March 1936. Germany reoccupies the Rhineland.
April 1936. Moves to The Stores, Wallington, Hertfordshire.
20 April 1936. Publication of third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
9 June 1936. Marries Eileen O’Shaughnessy.
18 July 1936. Spanish Civil War begins.
10 December 1936. Edward VIII abdicates and is succeeded by George VI.
December 1936. Leaves for Spain to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
January to June 1937. Serves in Independent Labour Party contingent with the POUM militia on the Aragon Front.
8 March 1937. Publishes The Road to Wigan Pier. In July returns to Wallington.
20 May 1937. Shot through the throat by Fascist sniper, but narrowly survives.
March to September 1938. Patient at Preston Hall sanatorium, Kent. Leaves for French Morocco to convalesce.
25 April 1938. Publication of Homage to Catalonia. Seriously ill with tubercular lesion in one lung.
April 1939. Returns to Wallington.
12 June 1939. Publication of fourth novel, Coming Up for Air.
1 September 1939. Second World War begins.
11 March 1940. Publishes Inside the Whale and Other Essays.
May 1940. Moves to Regent’s Park, London. Joins Local Defence Volunteers (the Home Guard).
10 May 1940. German armies break across the borders of three neutral states, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, and invade France. Winston Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as UK Prime Minister.
14 June 1940. Paris occupied by German army.
7 September 1940. Start of Luftwaffe bombing raids on London (‘the Blitz’).
19 February 1941. Publishes The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.
April 1941. Moves to St John’s Wood, London.
22 June 1941. Germany invades Soviet Union.
August 1941. Takes up appointment as Talks Assistant, subsequently Talks Producer, in the Indian section of the BBC’s Eastern Service.
7 December 1941. Japanese attack US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. America enters the war.
Summer 1942. Moves to Maida Vale, London.
November 1943. Leaves BBC to take up the post of Literary Editor of Tribune. Leaves Home Guard on medical grounds. Begins work on Animal Farm.
28 November–1 December 1943. Tehran Conference, at which the ‘Big Three’ (Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill) determine the shape of the post-war world.
February 1944. Completes Animal Farm.
Summer 1944. Makes first visit to Jura, Inner Hebrides.
June 1944. He and Eileen adopt a son, Richard Horatio Blair.
6 June 1944. Allied invasion of Occupied Europe begins with assault on Normandy beaches.
October 1944. Moves to Canonbury Square, Islington, London.
February to March 1945. War correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News in France and Germany.
29 March 1945. Death of Eileen Blair.
12 April 1945. Roosevelt dies and is succeeded by Harry S. Truman.
30 April 1945. Death of Hitler.
7 May 1945. End of war in Europe.
26 July 1945. After winning UK General Election, the Labour Party’s Clement Attlee succeeds Churchill as UK Prime Minister.
6 and 9 August 1945. First atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
17 August 1945. Publishes fifth novel, Animal Farm.
1 September 1945. Second World War ends. ‘Free elections’ in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria followed by the installation of pro-Soviet satellite governments.
September 1945. Pays second visit to Jura.
October 1945. Writes essay ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ for Tribune, which includes first use of the phrase ‘Cold War’.
February 1946. Publishes Critical Essays.
5 March 1946. Churchill, in a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, coins the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ to describe the division of Western democracies and the Soviet-dominated regimes of Eastern Europe.
May to October 1946. Living at Barnhill, Jura. At work on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
1 July 1946. The US begins a programme of nuclear testing at its base on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Mid-October 1946. Returns to Canonbury Square.
19 December 1946. Beginning of the First Indochina War.
April 1947. Returns to Jura.
May 1947. Sends his publisher a version of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’.
5 June 1947. US Secretary of State George Marshall lays out a plan to rebuild Western Europe.
August 1947. Publishes The English People in the series Britain in Pictures.
November 1947. Finishes first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
December 1947. Admitted to Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, Scotland, with tuberculosis of left lung.
January to July 1948. Remains at Hairmyres.
3 April 1948. Truman signs the Economic Recovery Act, intended to restore the infrastructure of post-war Europe.
24 June 1948. Stalin orders the Berlin Blockade.
Early November 1948. Finishes Nineteen Eighty-Four. Final version sent to agent and publisher a month later. Now gravely ill.
2 November 1948. Truman defeats the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey in the US presidential election.
January 1949. Leaves Jura for the last time for Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, Gloucestershire.
8 June 1949. UK publication of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
13 June 1949. US publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Early September 1949. Transferred to University College Hospital, London.
1 October 1949. Mao Zedong declares the foundation of the People’s Republic of China.
13 October 1949. Marries Sonia Brownell.
21 January 1950. Dies of pulmonary tuberculosis, aged 46.
26 January 1950. Buried at All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.