By George, he's online
'Would Orwell have been a blogger?' former Observer books editor Robert McCrum pondered last year, rather presciently, it turns out. The convenors of the Orwell Prize announced plans last week to publish Orwell's diaries as a daily blog on their website, 70 years after he began writing them. This is the first time the diaries, which cover Orwell's thoughts on everything from communism to cookery, will be published in full. But the Browser wonders: does a blog by a dead person count as a real blog, as the author cannot engage in vicious spats with commentators or post photographs of his cat?
War-crime rhymes
What is it with murderous dictators and poetry? Much attention last week was focused on the verses that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic wrote as a young man. But Karadzic is just the latest in a long line of tyrannical bards, from Stalin and Chairman Mao (whose stanzas are still popular in China) to Saddam Hussein (whose final offering to the world was a poetic flourish described by one reviewer as 'highly alliterative and difficult... to comprehend fully'). Karadzic's efforts have even inspired an earnest paper by a legal scholar entitled 'Is Poetry a War Crime?' Well, that may be taking things a bit far, but one certainly suspects that there were some heinous crimes committed against language in all four of the above cases.
More £10k than JK
Forbes magazine has revealed that JK Rowling is not only the world's richest author, but the world's highest-earning celebrity; her income last year was £150m. But before aspiring scribes boot up their computers en masse, inspired by dreams of wealth and fame, it is worth remembering that becoming rich through writing is only slightly more likely than achieving an Olympic medal in Quidditch. According to the Society of Authors, the average salary for a writer in the UK is £10,000 - which should give anyone thinking of entering the field pause for thought.