BioGraph
Connecting Michelle Obama and George Orwell
Michelle Obama
Former First Lady of the United States, attorney, and author (born 1964)
On her first trip abroad in April 2009, she toured a cancer ward with Sarah Brown, wife of British prime minister Gordon Brown. '' Newsweek'' described her first trip abroad as an exhibition of her so-called "star power" and MSN described it as a display of sartorial elegance.
Gordon Brown
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010
Lord Jenkins, then Oxford Chancellor and himself a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said "nearly every fact he used was false."
Michelle Obama
Former First Lady of the United States, attorney, and author (born 1964)
But it may not be smart politics to mock him in a way that turns him from the glam JFK into the mundane Gerald Ford, toasting his own English muffin.
John F. Kennedy
He intended to study under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE), as his older brother had done.
Harold Laski
English academic
George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" cited, as his first example of poor writing, a 53-word sentence with five negatives from Laski's "Essay in Freedom of Expression": "I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate." (Orwell parodied it with " A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.") However, 67 of the Labour MPs elected in 1945 had been taught by Laski as university students, at Workers' Educational Association classes or on courses for wartime officers.
Michelle Obama
Former First Lady of the United States, attorney, and author (born 1964)
Obama aimed to humanize her husband by relating stories about him, attempting to appeal to female voters in swing states. Paul Harris of '' The Guardian'' said the same tactic was being used by Ann Romney, wife of 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney
President]] Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Alex Azar during a White House listening session on the youth vaping and electronic cigarette epidemic
Kellyanne Conway
American political consultant and pollster
Conway's phrase reminded liberal-leaning commentators of "Newspeak", an obfuscatory language style that is a key element of the society portrayed in George Orwell's dystopian novel '' 1984''.
Michelle Obama
Former First Lady of the United States, attorney, and author (born 1964)
Obama has been compared to Jacqueline Kennedy due to her sense of style, and also to Barbara Bush for her discipline and decorum.
Barbara Bush
Former First Lady of the United States
Former British Prime Minister John Major and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney were also in attendance.
John Major
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1990 to 1997
Major was often mocked for his nostalgic evocation of what sounded like the lost Britain of the 1950s {{xref|(see Merry England)}};{{Sfn|Taylor|2006|p=29}} for example, his famous speech stating that "Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – 'old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'." Major complained in his memoirs that these words (which drew upon a passage in George Orwell's essay '' The Lion and the Unicorn''{{--)}} had been misrepresented as being more naive and romantic than he had intended, and indeed his memoirs were dismissive of the common conservative viewpoint that there was once a time of moral rectitude; Major wrote that "life has never been as simple as that".
