The Apprentice...

On this day...Aldous Huxley was hired as a schoolmaster at Eton in 1917. After deterioring eyesight had put pay to a career in medicine, the future author of 'Brave New World', returned to his alma mater to teach French. Yet it is one of his students that is arguably more noteworthy. Eric Blair, who would later use the pen name George Orwell, was impressed with his teacher's mastery of language despite Huxley being, by accounts, a poor educator.

This is only one of many relationships forged between authors throughout history. Famous pairings include:

• C.S. Lewis & J. R. R. Tolkein
• Bram Stoker & Oscar Wilde (Stoker married Wilde's fiance)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald & Ernest Hemingway

George Orwell far from Down and Out...

Joining the recent spate of literary auctions, a rare signed first edition of George Orwell's first full-length work, has sold for £86,000. An autobiographical work, 'Down and Out in Paris and London' was first published in 1933. This particular copy comes complete with dust jacket, and the note, 'with the author's kind regards, to Mr LP Moore without whose kind assistance this book would never have been published. Eric Blair, 24.12.32'.

The lot was originally estimated to sell at between £2,500 and £3,500, and Aaron Dean, a book specialist at the auction house, was astounded at the final bid, saying, 'I would be shocked if it isn't a record...I was absolutely stunned'.

On this day...

National Pig Day is celebrated, albeit on a small scale, in the U.S. The holiday first started in 1972, and lists it purpose as being, 'to accord the pig its rightful, though generally unrecognised, place as one of man's most intellectual and domesticated animals'. Events take place right across the country, including a parade, pig crafts, and, of course, the consumption of BLTs, chops and sausages. Pigs have, though maybe not as many as they deserve, several fictional representatives.

Perhaps the most famous, or at least most commercial, is Dick King-Smith's Babe, the protagonist of short story 'The Sheep-Pig'. Yet surely the most important is Napolean of George Orwell's 'Animal Farm'. Based on Stalin whilst named after Bonaparte, Napolean's role within the communist allegory, that of 'President of Animal Farm' - a corrupted dictator who exploits the other animals. On a less serious note, Piglet, is one of the most cherished children's characters, having featured in A.A. Milne's 'Winnie the Pooh'. Based on one of his son's stuffed toys, Piglet is generally timid, yet often conquers his fears. Pigs also feature in works by, Beatrix Potter, Terry Pratchett, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Jail bird books...

'You could be jailed for reading'. So says 'The Independent', who has collated a list of books that to read could have been a punishable offence.

• 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' by D.H. Lawrence - banned for obscenity in 1928 due to explicit nature of language and frank portrayal of sex
• 'Naked Lunch' by William S. Burroughs - banned for obscenity in 1962 due to incidents of child murder and paedophilia
• 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury - ironically a novel about the banning of books, the work published in 1953 is said to contain hints of McCarthyism
• 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov - the Home Office instructed British Customs officers to seize all copies of the novel in 1955, due to the narrator's inappropriate relationship with a 12 year old girl
• 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert - banned, then acquitted for 'offences against public morals' in 1857, Flaubert justified it only through the eventual death of his protagonist
• 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli - originally written in 1513, it was banned by the Pope in 1559 for promoting anti-Christian beliefs
• '120 Days of Sodom' by Marquis de Sade - frequently banned for depicitions of orgies and male licentiousness, the 1785 novel was of the typical Sade mould
• 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell - its highly negative portrayal of Communism led the book to being banned in the Soviet Union in 1950 by the Stalin dictatorship

On this day...

English author Eric Blair, better known by pseudonym George Orwell, died in 1950, at the age of 46. Born in India, where his father work in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, he moved to England with his mother when he was one year old. There, inspired by his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, he began to write poetry, telling her that he would write a book similiar in style to that of H.G.Wells' 'A Modern Utopia'. Orwell obtained a scholarship to Eton and thrived on his studies there, yet without the sufficient funds for university, he was forced to choose a new career path; the Indian Imperial Police. After a posting in Burma, Orwell decided to become a full time writer and returned home. So started of period of his life during which he explored both England and abroad, using his experiences of poverty to influence his works, much like one of his literary heroes, Jack London. Serving as part of the Home Guard during World War Two, Orwell's works became of an increasingly political and socialist nature. The latter perhaps epitomised by his description of Dickens as, 'a nineteenth-century liberal...a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls'. Orwell's best known works include 'Animal Farm' and the influential 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

George Orwell's Indian homecoming..

The birthplace of English writer Goerge Orwell, is to receive a makeover after years of dilapidation. With his father an agent in the opium department, Orwell was born in Motihari, India; a small town near the Nepalese border. Although he and his family left for England the next year, 'Orwell cared about India all his life'. Yet his house fell into disrepair, a state heightened by earthquakes and has been home to numerous animals. Now the government has decided to renovate it in order to attract more tourists to one of India's most undeveloped states, saying that they 'will not allow George Orwell's ancestral house, where he was born, to be lost to history'. Calls for renovation have been mooted before, notably in 2003, the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. The work will begin  early 2010.

On this day...

Albert Camus, an Algerian-born, French writer, was born in 1913. Camus, also a philosophical authority, was often cited as being an advocate of exisitentialist thought, in which induvidual should primarily be concerned with their own existance; yet Camus himself denied this. He later became associated with absurdism, which deems the search by humanity for meaning in the universe to be futile. Influenced by figures such as Orwell and Dostoevsky, Camus tranferred these ideas into novels; producing such works as 'The Stranger', 'The Plague' and 'The Fall'. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 for illuminating 'the problems of the human conscience in our times', becoming the first African-born writer and second youngest recipient of the award. He died in 1960, earning him the undesirable title of shortest-lived literature laureate to date.