George Orwell was an informer for the British government who named Sean O'Casey and the playwright George Bernard Shaw, along with Charlie Chaplin in a long list of Soviet sympathisers, according to a new edition of the author's works.
Other names on the list of more than 130 "crypto-communists" - some of which Orwell fed to a shadowy arm of Britain's Foreign Office - include the poets Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and two Labour MPs, the former cabinet minister Richard Crossman and Tom Driberg.
The names, contained in a 20-volume edition of Orwell's works to be published next week, were published in the Daily Telegraph yesterday.
Orwell, the anti-totalitarian author of 1984 and Animal Farm, was revealed as a government informer two years ago when documents from the Public Record Office were declassified. But the names remained secret. Even now, the editor of the new collection, Prof Peter Davison, has withheld more than 30 names because the people are still alive.
Orwell, who died of tuberculosis in 1950, was an avowed socialist who was equally passionately opposed to totalitarianism. Shortly before his death he offered to draw up a list of journalists and writers who, he judged, "are crypto-communists, fellow travellers, or inclined that way".
The list, supplied to a special anti-communist propaganda unit of the Foreign Office, was accompanied with some brutally frank commentary by Orwell. Those singled out in an alphabetical list written out in a small blue notebook include broadcaster and novelist J.B. Priestley ("strong sympathiser . . . very anti-USA"). The American writer John Steinbeck is dismissed as a "spurious writer".
The fashionable and bohemian American socialite Nancy Cunard is quickly dismissed with the words: "Probably only sentimental sympathiser. Silly. Has money."
Orwell said of George Bernard Shaw that he was not to be trusted because he was "reliably pro-Russian on all major issues". He said Richard Crossman was "too dishonest to be an outright fellow-traveller" in the communist party.
A friend of the writer, Celia Kirwan, who helped him to pass on the names to the Foreign Office, defended Orwell's actions. "I think George was quite right to do it," she told the Daily Telegraph.