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 leg" and Spender described him as having real entertainment value "like, as I say, watching a Charlie Chaplin movie." A friend of Eileen's reminisced about her tolerance and humour, often at Orwell's expense. One biography of Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak. In Burma, he struck out at a Burmese boy who, while "fooling around" with his friends, had "accidentally bumped into him" at a station, resulting in Orwell falling "heavily" down some stairs. One of his former pupils recalled being beaten so hard he could not sit down for a week. When sharing a flat with