Eric Blair was too young for the trenches, but while at Eton, he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.

When the war was over, he may have felt guilty, like a lot of his generation -- guilt for missing the slaughter.

The next step after Eton should have been Oxford. But like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.

His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.

Even if Eric had had the chance, it's likely he would have rejected the smoothly-moneyed escalator through privilege. Instead, it was off to the colonies.

There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though. He might have shared some of Churchill's idealism about the do-good empire.

Five years in the Burmese police, perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service, smartly cured him of that.

Doing his job as efficiently as he could, rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten, he wore his power like a hair shirt.

The Burmese he caught and jailed, he knew, didn't think of themselves as criminals, but as victims of foreign conquerors.

All over the empire, there were men who hated their part in it as heartily as he did, but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence or the cowardice of acquiescence.