Background
The Information Research Department was a propaganda unit set up by the Labour government in 1948 based at the United Kingdom's Foreign Office, after the start of the Cold War.
Celia Kirwan, who had just started working as Robert Conquest's assistant at the IRD, visited Orwell at a sanatorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis in March 1949. Orwell wrote down the names of persons he considered sympathetic to communism and therefore unsuitable as writers for the Department, and enclosed it in a letter to Kirwan. The list became public in 2003.
Having previously worked for Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, and briefly as an editorial assistant for Humphrey Slater's Polemic, Kirwan was Arthur Koestler's sister-in-law and one of the four women to whom Orwell proposed after the death of his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1945. Although Koestler had supported such a match, Kirwan turned him down.
Read more about this topic: Orwell's List
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