Sonia Orwell of George Orwell during the last decade of the writer's life, and other friends of Orwell, have said that Sonia was the model for Julia, the heroine of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the "girl from the fiction department" who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged hero, Winston Smith. As Orwell wrote in "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "the girl from the fiction department... was looking at him... She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life... She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated... All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.
George Orwell of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) Orwell wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put "Gulliver's Travels" among them." Orwell was an admirer of Arthur Koestler and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn, a secluded farmhouse that belonged to Clough Williams-Ellis, in the Vale of Ffestiniog. Orwell reviewed Koestler's. "Darkness at Noon" for the "New Statesman" in 1941, saying: Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece