Sonia Orwell She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead." Together with David Astor and Richard Rees, George Orwell's literary executor, Brownell established the George Orwell Archive at University College London, which opened in 1960. Brownell was fiercely protective of Orwell's estate and edited, with Ian Angus, "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell" (4 volumes, Secker & Warburg, London, 1968). Brownell married Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1958, and had affairs with several British painters, including Lucian Freud, William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore.
George Orwell his size-12 boots, was a source of amusement. David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist". Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen—helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric. Orwell was an atheist who identified himself with the humanist outlook on life. Despite this, and despite his criticisms of