Statue of George Orwell Statue of George Orwell A statue of George Orwell by the British sculptor Martin Jennings was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, in London. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with Orwell's words "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear", from an unused preface to "Animal Farm". The head of BBC history, Robert Seatter, said of Orwell and the statue that "He reputedly based his notorious Room 101 from "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on a room he had worked in whilst
George Orwell "self-interested." Literary critic James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "Orwell was on the humanist side, of course—basically an unmetaphysical, English version of Camus's philosophy of perpetual godless struggle." Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular. He found the church to be a "selfish [...] church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. In their 1972 study, "The Unknown Orwell", the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at