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.
Statue of George Orwell in "Private Eye", awarded the statue the "Sir Hugh Casson Award for 2017's ugliest new building" – "if sculpture is eligible". Orwell "surely deserves better", he wrote. "The great man is depicted holding a fag, dressed in a crumpled suit and standing like a music hall artist about to crack a joke. The plinth is pathetic. ... No hint here of Orwell's ambivalent relationship with the BBC." Jennings pointed out that "smoking was so much a part of [Orwell's] identity that it would have been unthinkable not to represent him with a roll-up between his fingers." Richard Lance Keeble, Chair