“John Pickford, BBC World Service, came to interview me about George Orwell. A pleasant young man, but the questions these people put are impossible to answer. One wonders whether the generality of people expected easy answers to the human condition before their minds were rotted by popular journalism, TV, the notion that all life’s problems could be answered off the cuff by TV ‘personalities,’ suchlike, in two or three sentences. All the same there is perhaps a faint impression of a person given by the worlds, demeanour, of a friend.”
Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986, entry for October 27, 1983