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 stated: "John Podhoretz did claim that if Orwell were alive today, he'd be standing with the neo-conservatives and against the Left. And the question arises, to what extent can you even begin to predict the political positions of somebody who's been dead three decades and more by that time?" In "Orwell's Victory", Christopher Hitchens argues: "In answer to the accusation of inconsistency Orwell as a writer was forever taking his own temperature. In other words, here was someone who never stopped testing and adjusting his intelligence". John Rodden points out the "undeniable conservative features in the Orwell physiognomy" and remarks