To this day he has warm childhood memories of his father Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell. 'He was a hands-on parent with me,' Richard Blair recalled this week. 'He did those practical things that at that time a woman would usually do.'Rather less affectionate terms have been used to describe Richard's father in recent days — the kind of words that can destroy a reputation overnight: 'sadistic', 'misogynistic', 'homophobic', 'sometimes violent'.It is striking — indeed some would say bemusing — that almost 74 years after Orwell's premature death, which left his son an orphan aged five, someone should use such inflammatory language to describe the author of such classics of English literature as Animal Farm and 1984.
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