TCS NQT || 2026 || VERBAL ABILITY || READING COMPREHENSION || HW

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began. A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere. Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth. The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling. The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? Apparently not. We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth. We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house. This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful. Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital. I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here. With a little work, you can almost retrace his steps, day by day. Orwell kept a diary from at least 1931 until October 1949, four months before his death. In his introduction to a 2012 edition of the diaries, the late Christopher Hitchens—Orwell’s biggest contemporary champion—wrote that they “enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” The entries from Jura, however, are an exception. They offer no look into Orwell’s mood, thoughts on politics, or difficulties with his novel. The only hint that he might be a writer is the entry of August 31, 1947: “Most of afternoon trying to mend typewriter.” Instead, the diaries are an account of seedlings planted, eggs collected, fish caught, and gasoline lost from a leaky tank; of the depredations of birds, rabbits, deer, and slugs on the garden; Orwell’s walks, his guests, and their outings. The conventional wisdom is that Orwell’s years on Jura killed him, nearly robbing the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of his biographers or friends seemed to consider that Jura, despite or because of its harshness, might have extended his life and given him the psychic space to imagine a place utterly unlike it. Today, the island is just as empty, and life only a little less difficult, than when he was there. The 21st century has moved closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than it has to Jura. George Orwell didn’t like the Scots and was embarrassed that his real name—Eric Blair—led some people to believe he was one. Nevertheless, he’d had the idea of moving to a Hebridean Island for at least five years before he set foot on Jura in September 1945. The place had been recommended to him by David Astor, an editor at a London newspaper, The Observer, for which Orwell wrote book reviews. Astor’s family, wealthy as few others, had a summer estate on the island. He arranged for Orwell to stay with a farm family. While there, the writer made plans to rent a vacant house near the northern end of the island the following year. “I was horrified when I heard this,” Astor later said. Orwell wouldn’t seem the best candidate for life there. He was tired from work as a broadcaster at the BBC, a war correspondent in France, and a member of the Home Guard during World War II. He had a chronic form of tuberculosis and in a few months would suffer a pulmonary hemorrhage. His wife had died in surgery earlier in the year, and at the age of 42, he was raising their son, a year and a half old, with the help of a housekeeper. At the same time, Orwell was famous for his love of adversity. Destitute, he had worked as a dishwasher in Paris, almost dying there in a paupers’ hospital, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Less known to his admiring readers was his fondness for gardening, cabinetmaking, and rural life. The house he rented was situated on the 20,000-acre Ardlussa estate, which comprised the northern end of the island. The estate was owned by Robin Fletcher and his wife, Margaret, who had moved there after the war and were trying to restore its economic viability. They were happy to have another tenant even if he wasn’t a farmer. Robin had been a housemaster at Eton, the boarding school Orwell had attended. During the war, he served in the Gordon Highlanders, was taken prisoner in Singapore, and had worked on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. Margaret received three postcards of 12 words each during his three-year captivity. Her two brothers died during the war. One, a worker in a Glasgow aircraft factory, had collapsed mysteriously at 22; the other, Ardlussa’s previous owner, was killed in Belgium. Indeed, the war’s human toll was everywhere in evidence. Among the estate’s tenants were two men who landed at Normandy, two veterans of the Italian campaign, and two former prisoners of the Japanese. Near Barnhill lived a single man, Bill Dunn, with a below-the-knee amputation from a war wound. He’d placed an advertisement in the Oban Times seeking a farm tenancy that Robin had answered. In a nearby croft was a former Polish soldier, Tony Rozga, who was married to a Scottish woman. Orwell escaped injury in the war but had been wounded in its rehearsal. In 1937, he took a sniper’s bullet to the neck in the Spanish Civil War. Miraculously, its only permanent effect was on his voice, which people reported was high and soft. (Curiously, despite Orwell’s long employment at the BBC, no recording of him is known to exist.) Jura had one store, one telephone, and one physician, at a village called Craighouse, 16 ½ miles south of Ardlussa House. Mail was delivered to the settlement there three times a week and forwarded to Barnhill, seven miles farther north, each Thursday. Food and fuel rationing was still in effect. The store in Craighouse kept the ration books, and island residents put in their orders by mail. Orwell spent one night at Ardlussa House after a 48-hour trip from London. Interviewed decades later, Margaret Fletcher remembers that “he arrived at the front door looking very thin and gaunt and worn … a very sick-looking man.” The next day, she and Robin took him up to Barnhill and left him in the cold, empty, four-bedroom house. Orwell got to work. On May 24, 1946, in his second diary entry on Jura, he wrote: “Started digging garden, ie. breaking in the turf. Back-breaking work. Soil not only as dry as a bone, but very stony. Nevertheless there was a little rain last night. As soon as I have a fair patch dug, shall stick in salad vegetables.” A few days later, his sister, Avril, five years younger, arrived. She’d spent the war as a factory worker and was ready for a long vacation. She, too, decided to stay for good. Many people, both friends and biographers, have speculated about why Orwell decided to move to Jura. (He never addressed the question.) Among their theories: He sought a place lacking distraction. He was pessimistic about the world’s ability to avoid nuclear war and thought that a Hebridean island would be far from first-strike targets. He wanted to raise his son where the boy could run around outdoors. He feared Soviet agents might try to kill him as they had Trotsky, another of Stalin’s sworn enemies. (Orwell always kept a loaded Lugar close by.) The magazine editor Richard Rees saw self-punishment in the choice. “I fear that the near-impossibility of making a tolerably comfortable life there was a positive inducement to Orwell,” he wrote.

It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? Apparently not. We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth. We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house. This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful. Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital. I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here. With a little work, you can almost retrace his steps, day by day. Orwell kept a diary from at least 1931 until October 1949, four months before his death. In his introduction to a 2012 edition of the diaries, the late Christopher Hitchens—Orwell’s biggest contemporary champion—wrote that they “enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” The entries from Jura, however, are an exception. They offer no look into Orwell’s mood, thoughts on politics, or difficulties with his novel. The only hint that he might be a writer is the entry of August 31, 1947: “Most of afternoon trying to mend typewriter.” Instead, the diaries are an account of seedlings planted, eggs collected, fish caught, and gasoline lost from a leaky tank; of the depredations of birds, rabbits, deer, and slugs on the garden; Orwell’s walks, his guests, and their outings. The conventional wisdom is that Orwell’s years on Jura killed him, nearly robbing the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of his biographers or friends seemed to consider that Jura, despite or because of its harshness, might have extended his life and given him the psychic space to imagine a place utterly unlike it. Today, the island is just as empty, and life only a little less difficult, than when he was there. The 21st century has moved closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than it has to Jura. George Orwell didn’t like the Scots and was embarrassed that his real name—Eric Blair—led some people to believe he was one. Nevertheless, he’d had the idea of moving to a Hebridean Island for at least five years before he set foot on Jura in September 1945. The place had been recommended to him by David Astor, an editor at a London newspaper, The Observer, for which Orwell wrote book reviews. Astor’s family, wealthy as few others, had a summer estate on the island. He arranged for Orwell to stay with a farm family. While there, the writer made plans to rent a vacant house near the northern end of the island the following year. “I was horrified when I heard this,” Astor later said. Orwell wouldn’t seem the best candidate for life there. He was tired from work as a broadcaster at the BBC, a war correspondent in France, and a member of the Home Guard during World War II. He had a chronic form of tuberculosis and in a few months would suffer a pulmonary hemorrhage. His wife had died in surgery earlier in the year, and at the age of 42, he was raising their son, a year and a half old, with the help of a housekeeper. At the same time, Orwell was famous for his love of adversity. Destitute, he had worked as a dishwasher in Paris, almost dying there in a paupers’ hospital, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Less known to his admiring readers was his fondness for gardening, cabinetmaking, and rural life. The house he rented was situated on the 20,000-acre Ardlussa estate, which comprised the northern end of the island. The estate was owned by Robin Fletcher and his wife, Margaret, who had moved there after the war and were trying to restore its economic viability. They were happy to have another tenant even if he wasn’t a farmer. Robin had been a housemaster at Eton, the boarding school Orwell had attended. During the war, he served in the Gordon Highlanders, was taken prisoner in Singapore, and had worked on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. Margaret received three postcards of 12 words each during his three-year captivity. Her two brothers died during the war. One, a worker in a Glasgow aircraft factory, had collapsed mysteriously at 22; the other, Ardlussa’s previous owner, was killed in Belgium. Indeed, the war’s human toll was everywhere in evidence. Among the estate’s tenants were two men who landed at Normandy, two veterans of the Italian campaign, and two former prisoners of the Japanese. Near Barnhill lived a single man, Bill Dunn, with a below-the-knee amputation from a war wound. He’d placed an advertisement in the Oban Times seeking a farm tenancy that Robin had answered. In a nearby croft was a former Polish soldier, Tony Rozga, who was married to a Scottish woman. Orwell escaped injury in the war but had been wounded in its rehearsal. In 1937, he took a sniper’s bullet to the neck in the Spanish Civil War. Miraculously, its only permanent effect was on his voice, which people reported was high and soft. (Curiously, despite Orwell’s long employment at the BBC, no recording of him is known to exist.) Jura had one store, one telephone, and one physician, at a village called Craighouse, 16 ½ miles south of Ardlussa House. Mail was delivered to the settlement there three times a week and forwarded to Barnhill, seven miles farther north, each Thursday. Food and fuel rationing was still in effect. The store in Craighouse kept the ration books, and island residents put in their orders by mail. Orwell spent one night at Ardlussa House after a 48-hour trip from London. Interviewed decades later, Margaret Fletcher remembers that “he arrived at the front door looking very thin and gaunt and worn … a very sick-looking man.” The next day, she and Robin took him up to Barnhill and left him in the cold, empty, four-bedroom house. Orwell got to work. On May 24, 1946, in his second diary entry on Jura, he wrote: “Started digging garden, ie. breaking in the turf. Back-breaking work. Soil not only as dry as a bone, but very stony. Nevertheless there was a little rain last night. As soon as I have a fair patch dug, shall stick in salad vegetables.” A few days later, his sister, Avril, five years younger, arrived. She’d spent the war as a factory worker and was ready for a long vacation. She, too, decided to stay for good. Many people, both friends and biographers, have speculated about why Orwell decided to move to Jura. (He never addressed the question.) Among their theories: He sought a place lacking distraction. He was pessimistic about the world’s ability to avoid nuclear war and thought that a Hebridean island would be far from first-strike targets. He wanted to raise his son where the boy could run around outdoors. He feared Soviet agents might try to kill him as they had Trotsky, another of Stalin’s sworn enemies. (Orwell always kept a loaded Lugar close by.) The magazine editor Richard Rees saw self-punishment in the choice. “I fear that the near-impossibility of making a tolerably comfortable life there was a positive inducement to Orwell,” he wrote.

It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? Apparently not. We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth. We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house. This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful. Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital. I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here. With a little work, you can almost retrace his steps, day by day. Orwell kept a diary from at least 1931 until October 1949, four months before his death. In his introduction to a 2012 edition of the diaries, the late Christopher Hitchens—Orwell’s biggest contemporary champion—wrote that they “enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” The entries from Jura, however, are an exception. They offer no look into Orwell’s mood, thoughts on politics, or difficulties with his novel. The only hint that he might be a writer is the entry of August 31, 1947: “Most of afternoon trying to mend typewriter.” Instead, the diaries are an account of seedlings planted, eggs collected, fish caught, and gasoline lost from a leaky tank; of the depredations of birds, rabbits, deer, and slugs on the garden; Orwell’s walks, his guests, and their outings. The conventional wisdom is that Orwell’s years on Jura killed him, nearly robbing the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of his biographers or friends seemed to consider that Jura, despite or because of its harshness, might have extended his life and given him the psychic space to imagine a place utterly unlike it. Today, the island is just as empty, and life only a little less difficult, than when he was there. The 21st century has moved closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than it has to Jura. George Orwell didn’t like the Scots and was embarrassed that his real name—Eric Blair—led some people to believe he was one. Nevertheless, he’d had the idea of moving to a Hebridean Island for at least five years before he set foot on Jura in September 1945. The place had been recommended to him by David Astor, an editor at a London newspaper, The Observer, for which Orwell wrote book reviews. Astor’s family, wealthy as few others, had a summer estate on the island. He arranged for Orwell to stay with a farm family. While there, the writer made plans to rent a vacant house near the northern end of the island the following year. “I was horrified when I heard this,” Astor later said. Orwell wouldn’t seem the best candidate for life there. He was tired from work as a broadcaster at the BBC, a war correspondent in France, and a member of the Home Guard during World War II. He had a chronic form of tuberculosis and in a few months would suffer a pulmonary hemorrhage. His wife had died in surgery earlier in the year, and at the age of 42, he was raising their son, a year and a half old, with the help of a housekeeper. At the same time, Orwell was famous for his love of adversity. Destitute, he had worked as a dishwasher in Paris, almost dying there in a paupers’ hospital, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Less known to his admiring readers was his fondness for gardening, cabinetmaking, and rural life. The house he rented was situated on the 20,000-acre Ardlussa estate, which comprised the northern end of the island. The estate was owned by Robin Fletcher and his wife, Margaret, who had moved there after the war and were trying to restore its economic viability. They were happy to have another tenant even if he wasn’t a farmer. Robin had been a housemaster at Eton, the boarding school Orwell had attended. During the war, he served in the Gordon Highlanders, was taken prisoner in Singapore, and had worked on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. Margaret received three postcards of 12 words each during his three-year captivity. Her two brothers died during the war. One, a worker in a Glasgow aircraft factory, had collapsed mysteriously at 22; the other, Ardlussa’s previous owner, was killed in Belgium. Indeed, the war’s human toll was everywhere in evidence. Among the estate’s tenants were two men who landed at Normandy, two veterans of the Italian campaign, and two former prisoners of the Japanese. Near Barnhill lived a single man, Bill Dunn, with a below-the-knee amputation from a war wound. He’d placed an advertisement in the Oban Times seeking a farm tenancy that Robin had answered. In a nearby croft was a former Polish soldier, Tony Rozga, who was married to a Scottish woman. Orwell escaped injury in the war but had been wounded in its rehearsal. In 1937, he took a sniper’s bullet to the neck in the Spanish Civil War. Miraculously, its only permanent effect was on his voice, which people reported was high and soft. (Curiously, despite Orwell’s long employment at the BBC, no recording of him is known to exist.) Jura had one store, one telephone, and one physician, at a village called Craighouse, 16 ½ miles south of Ardlussa House. Mail was delivered to the settlement there three times a week and forwarded to Barnhill, seven miles farther north, each Thursday. Food and fuel rationing was still in effect. The store in Craighouse kept the ration books, and island residents put in their orders by mail. Orwell spent one night at Ardlussa House after a 48-hour trip from London. Interviewed decades later, Margaret Fletcher remembers that “he arrived at the front door looking very thin and gaunt and worn … a very sick-looking man.” The next day, she and Robin took him up to Barnhill and left him in the cold, empty, four-bedroom house. Orwell got to work. On May 24, 1946, in his second diary entry on Jura, he wrote: “Started digging garden, ie. breaking in the turf. Back-breaking work. Soil not only as dry as a bone, but very stony. Nevertheless there was a little rain last night. As soon as I have a fair patch dug, shall stick in salad vegetables.” A few days later, his sister, Avril, five years younger, arrived. She’d spent the war as a factory worker and was ready for a long vacation. She, too, decided to stay for good. Many people, both friends and biographers, have speculated about why Orwell decided to move to Jura. (He never addressed the question.) Among their theories: He sought a place lacking distraction. He was pessimistic about the world’s ability to avoid nuclear war and thought that a Hebridean island would be far from first-strike targets. He wanted to raise his son where the boy could run around outdoors. He feared Soviet agents might try to kill him as they had Trotsky, another of Stalin’s sworn enemies. (Orwell always kept a loaded Lugar close by.) The magazine editor Richard Rees saw self-punishment in the choice. “I fear that the near-impossibility of making a tolerably comfortable life there was a positive inducement to Orwell,” he wrote.

It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? Apparently not. We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth. We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house. This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful. Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital. I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here. With a little work, you can almost retrace his steps, day by day. Orwell kept a diary from at least 1931 until October 1949, four months before his death. In his introduction to a 2012 edition of the diaries, the late Christopher Hitchens—Orwell’s biggest contemporary champion—wrote that they “enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” The entries from Jura, however, are an exception. They offer no look into Orwell’s mood, thoughts on politics, or difficulties with his novel. The only hint that he might be a writer is the entry of August 31, 1947: “Most of afternoon trying to mend typewriter.” Instead, the diaries are an account of seedlings planted, eggs collected, fish caught, and gasoline lost from a leaky tank; of the depredations of birds, rabbits, deer, and slugs on the garden; Orwell’s walks, his guests, and their outings. The conventional wisdom is that Orwell’s years on Jura killed him, nearly robbing the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of his biographers or friends seemed to consider that Jura, despite or because of its harshness, might have extended his life and given him the psychic space to imagine a place utterly unlike it. Today, the island is just as empty, and life only a little less difficult, than when he was there. The 21st century has moved closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than it has to Jura. George Orwell didn’t like the Scots and was embarrassed that his real name—Eric Blair—led some people to believe he was one. Nevertheless, he’d had the idea of moving to a Hebridean Island for at least five years before he set foot on Jura in September 1945. The place had been recommended to him by David Astor, an editor at a London newspaper, The Observer, for which Orwell wrote book reviews. Astor’s family, wealthy as few others, had a summer estate on the island. He arranged for Orwell to stay with a farm family. While there, the writer made plans to rent a vacant house near the northern end of the island the following year. “I was horrified when I heard this,” Astor later said. Orwell wouldn’t seem the best candidate for life there. He was tired from work as a broadcaster at the BBC, a war correspondent in France, and a member of the Home Guard during World War II. He had a chronic form of tuberculosis and in a few months would suffer a pulmonary hemorrhage. His wife had died in surgery earlier in the year, and at the age of 42, he was raising their son, a year and a half old, with the help of a housekeeper. At the same time, Orwell was famous for his love of adversity. Destitute, he had worked as a dishwasher in Paris, almost dying there in a paupers’ hospital, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Less known to his admiring readers was his fondness for gardening, cabinetmaking, and rural life. The house he rented was situated on the 20,000-acre Ardlussa estate, which comprised the northern end of the island. The estate was owned by Robin Fletcher and his wife, Margaret, who had moved there after the war and were trying to restore its economic viability. They were happy to have another tenant even if he wasn’t a farmer. Robin had been a housemaster at Eton, the boarding school Orwell had attended. During the war, he served in the Gordon Highlanders, was taken prisoner in Singapore, and had worked on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. Margaret received three postcards of 12 words each during his three-year captivity. Her two brothers died during the war. One, a worker in a Glasgow aircraft factory, had collapsed mysteriously at 22; the other, Ardlussa’s previous owner, was killed in Belgium. Indeed, the war’s human toll was everywhere in evidence. Among the estate’s tenants were two men who landed at Normandy, two veterans of the Italian campaign, and two former prisoners of the Japanese. Near Barnhill lived a single man, Bill Dunn, with a below-the-knee amputation from a war wound. He’d placed an advertisement in the Oban Times seeking a farm tenancy that Robin had answered. In a nearby croft was a former Polish soldier, Tony Rozga, who was married to a Scottish woman. Orwell escaped injury in the war but had been wounded in its rehearsal. In 1937, he took a sniper’s bullet to the neck in the Spanish Civil War. Miraculously, its only permanent effect was on his voice, which people reported was high and soft. (Curiously, despite Orwell’s long employment at the BBC, no recording of him is known to exist.) Jura had one store, one telephone, and one physician, at a village called Craighouse, 16 ½ miles south of Ardlussa House. Mail was delivered to the settlement there three times a week and forwarded to Barnhill, seven miles farther north, each Thursday. Food and fuel rationing was still in effect. The store in Craighouse kept the ration books, and island residents put in their orders by mail. Orwell spent one night at Ardlussa House after a 48-hour trip from London. Interviewed decades later, Margaret Fletcher remembers that “he arrived at the front door looking very thin and gaunt and worn … a very sick-looking man.” The next day, she and Robin took him up to Barnhill and left him in the cold, empty, four-bedroom house. Orwell got to work. On May 24, 1946, in his second diary entry on Jura, he wrote: “Started digging garden, ie. breaking in the turf. Back-breaking work. Soil not only as dry as a bone, but very stony. Nevertheless there was a little rain last night. As soon as I have a fair patch dug, shall stick in salad vegetables.” A few days later, his sister, Avril, five years younger, arrived. She’d spent the war as a factory worker and was ready for a long vacation. She, too, decided to stay for good. Many people, both friends and biographers, have speculated about why Orwell decided to move to Jura. (He never addressed the question.) Among their theories: He sought a place lacking distraction. He was pessimistic about the world’s ability to avoid nuclear war and thought that a Hebridean island would be far from first-strike targets. He wanted to raise his son where the boy could run around outdoors. He feared Soviet agents might try to kill him as they had Trotsky, another of Stalin’s sworn enemies. (Orwell always kept a loaded Lugar close by.) The magazine editor Richard Rees saw self-punishment in the choice. “I fear that the near-impossibility of making a tolerably comfortable life there was a positive inducement to Orwell,” he wrote.

It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? Apparently not. We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth. We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house. This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful. Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital. I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here. With a little work, you can almost retrace his steps, day by day. Orwell kept a diary from at least 1931 until October 1949, four months before his death. In his introduction to a 2012 edition of the diaries, the late Christopher Hitchens—Orwell’s biggest contemporary champion—wrote that they “enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” The entries from Jura, however, are an exception. They offer no look into Orwell’s mood, thoughts on politics, or difficulties with his novel. The only hint that he might be a writer is the entry of August 31, 1947: “Most of afternoon trying to mend typewriter.” Instead, the diaries are an account of seedlings planted, eggs collected, fish caught, and gasoline lost from a leaky tank; of the depredations of birds, rabbits, deer, and slugs on the garden; Orwell’s walks, his guests, and their outings. The conventional wisdom is that Orwell’s years on Jura killed him, nearly robbing the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of his biographers or friends seemed to consider that Jura, despite or because of its harshness, might have extended his life and given him the psychic space to imagine a place utterly unlike it. Today, the island is just as empty, and life only a little less difficult, than when he was there. The 21st century has moved closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than it has to Jura. George Orwell didn’t like the Scots and was embarrassed that his real name—Eric Blair—led some people to believe he was one. Nevertheless, he’d had the idea of moving to a Hebridean Island for at least five years before he set foot on Jura in September 1945. The place had been recommended to him by David Astor, an editor at a London newspaper, The Observer, for which Orwell wrote book reviews. Astor’s family, wealthy as few others, had a summer estate on the island. He arranged for Orwell to stay with a farm family. While there, the writer made plans to rent a vacant house near the northern end of the island the following year. “I was horrified when I heard this,” Astor later said. Orwell wouldn’t seem the best candidate for life there. He was tired from work as a broadcaster at the BBC, a war correspondent in France, and a member of the Home Guard during World War II. He had a chronic form of tuberculosis and in a few months would suffer a pulmonary hemorrhage. His wife had died in surgery earlier in the year, and at the age of 42, he was raising their son, a year and a half old, with the help of a housekeeper. At the same time, Orwell was famous for his love of adversity. Destitute, he had worked as a dishwasher in Paris, almost dying there in a paupers’ hospital, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Less known to his admiring readers was his fondness for gardening, cabinetmaking, and rural life. The house he rented was situated on the 20,000-acre Ardlussa estate, which comprised the northern end of the island. The estate was owned by Robin Fletcher and his wife, Margaret, who had moved there after the war and were trying to restore its economic viability. They were happy to have another tenant even if he wasn’t a farmer. Robin had been a housemaster at Eton, the boarding school Orwell had attended. During the war, he served in the Gordon Highlanders, was taken prisoner in Singapore, and had worked on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. Margaret received three postcards of 12 words each during his three-year captivity. Her two brothers died during the war. One, a worker in a Glasgow aircraft factory, had collapsed mysteriously at 22; the other, Ardlussa’s previous owner, was killed in Belgium. Indeed, the war’s human toll was everywhere in evidence. Among the estate’s tenants were two men who landed at Normandy, two veterans of the Italian campaign, and two former prisoners of the Japanese. Near Barnhill lived a single man, Bill Dunn, with a below-the-knee amputation from a war wound. He’d placed an advertisement in the Oban Times seeking a farm tenancy that Robin had answered. In a nearby croft was a former Polish soldier, Tony Rozga, who was married to a Scottish woman. Orwell escaped injury in the war but had been wounded in its rehearsal. In 1937, he took a sniper’s bullet to the neck in the Spanish Civil War. Miraculously, its only permanent effect was on his voice, which people reported was high and soft. (Curiously, despite Orwell’s long employment at the BBC, no recording of him is known to exist.) Jura had one store, one telephone, and one physician, at a village called Craighouse, 16 ½ miles south of Ardlussa House. Mail was delivered to the settlement there three times a week and forwarded to Barnhill, seven miles farther north, each Thursday. Food and fuel rationing was still in effect. The store in Craighouse kept the ration books, and island residents put in their orders by mail. Orwell spent one night at Ardlussa House after a 48-hour trip from London. Interviewed decades later, Margaret Fletcher remembers that “he arrived at the front door looking very thin and gaunt and worn … a very sick-looking man.” The next day, she and Robin took him up to Barnhill and left him in the cold, empty, four-bedroom house. Orwell got to work. On May 24, 1946, in his second diary entry on Jura, he wrote: “Started digging garden, ie. breaking in the turf. Back-breaking work. Soil not only as dry as a bone, but very stony. Nevertheless there was a little rain last night. As soon as I have a fair patch dug, shall stick in salad vegetables.” A few days later, his sister, Avril, five years younger, arrived. She’d spent the war as a factory worker and was ready for a long vacation. She, too, decided to stay for good. Many people, both friends and biographers, have speculated about why Orwell decided to move to Jura. (He never addressed the question.) Among their theories: He sought a place lacking distraction. He was pessimistic about the world’s ability to avoid nuclear war and thought that a Hebridean island would be far from first-strike targets. He wanted to raise his son where the boy could run around outdoors. He feared Soviet agents might try to kill him as they had Trotsky, another of Stalin’s sworn enemies. (Orwell always kept a loaded Lugar close by.) The magazine editor Richard Rees saw self-punishment in the choice. “I fear that the near-impossibility of making a tolerably comfortable life there was a positive inducement to Orwell,” he wrote.

Socrates is widely considered to be the founding figure of Western philosophy – a thinker whose ideas, transmitted by the extensive writings of his devoted follower Plato, have shaped thinking for more than 2,000 years. ‘For better or worse,’ wrote the Classical scholar Diskin Clay in Platonic Questions (2000), ‘Plato’s Socrates is our Socrates.’ The enduring image of Socrates that comes from Plato is of a man of humble background, little education, few means and unappealing looks, who became a brilliant and disputatious philosopher married to an argumentative woman called Xanthippe. Both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ other principal biographer, were born c424 BCE, so they knew Socrates (born c469 BCE) only as an old man. Keen to defend his reputation from the charges of ‘introducing new kinds of gods’ and ‘corrupting young men’ on which he was eventually brought to trial and executed, they painted a picture of Socrates in late middle age as a pious teacher and unremitting ethical thinker, a man committed to shunning bodily pleasures for higher educational purposes. Yet this clearly idealized picture of Socrates is not the whole story, and it gives us no indication of the genesis of his ideas. Plato’s pupil Aristotle and other Ancient writers provide us with correctives to the Platonic Socrates. For instance, Aristotle’s followers Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli preserve biographical snippets that they might have known from their teacher. From them we learn that Socrates in his teens was intimate with a distinguished older philosopher, Archelaus; that he married more than once, the first time to an aristocratic woman called Myrto, with whom he had two sons; and that he had an affair with Aspasia of Miletus, the clever and influential woman who was later to become the partner of Pericles, a leading citizen of Athens. If these statements are to be believed, a different Socrates emerges: that of a highly placed young Athenian, whose personal experiences within an elevated milieu inspired him to embark on a new style of philosophy that was to change the way people thought ever afterwards. But can we trust these later authors? How could writers two or more generations removed from Socrates’ own time have felt entitled to contradict Plato? One answer is that Aristotle might have derived some information from Plato in person, rather than from his writings, and passed this on to his pupils; another is that, as a member of Plato’s Academy for 20 years, Aristotle might have known that Plato had elided certain facts to defend Socrates’ reputation; a third is that the later authors had access to further sources (oral and written) other than Plato, which they considered to be reliable. Plato’s Socrates is an eccentric. Socrates claimed to have heard voices in his head from youth, and is described as standing still in public places for long stretches of time, deep in thought. Plato notes these phenomena without comment, accepting Socrates’ own description of the voices as his ‘divine sign’, and reporting on his awe-inspiring ability to meditate for hours on end. Aristotle, the son of a doctor, took a more medical approach: he suggested that Socrates (along with other thinkers) suffered from a medical condition he calls ‘melancholy’. Recent medical investigators have agreed, speculating that Socrates’ behaviour was consistent with a medical condition known as catalepsy. Such a condition might well have made Socrates feel estranged from his peers in early life, encouraging him to embark on a different kind of lifestyle. If the received picture of Socrates’ life and personality merits reconsid­eration, what about his thought? Aristotle makes clear in his Metaphysics that Plato misrepresented Socrates regarding the so-called Theory of Forms: Socrates concerned himself with ethics, neglecting the natural world but seeking the universal in ethical matters, and he was the first to insist on definitions. Plato took over this doctrine, but argued that what was universal applied not to objects of sense but to entities of another kind. He thought a single description could not define things that are perceived, since such things are always changing. Unchanging entities he called ‘Forms’… Aristotle himself had little sympathy for such otherwordly views. As a biologist and scientist, he was mainly concerned with the empirical investigation of the world. In his own writings he dismissed the Forms, replacing them with a logical account of universals and their particular instantiations. For him, Socrates was also a more down-to-earth thinker than Plato sought to depict. Sources from late antiquity, such as the 5th-century CE Christian writers Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Cyril of Alexandria, state that Socrates was, at least as a younger man, a lover of both sexes. They corroborate occasional glimpses of an earthy Socrates in Plato’s own writings, such as in the dialogue Charmides where Socrates claims to be intensely aroused by the sight of a young man’s bare chest. However, the only partner of Socrates whom Plato names is Xanthippe; but since she was carrying a baby in her arms when Socrates was aged 70, it is unlikely they met more than a decade or so earlier, when Socrates was already in his 50s. Plato’s failure to mention the earlier aristocratic wife Myrto might be an attempt to minimise any perception that Socrates came from a relatively wealthy background with connections to high-ranking members of his community; it was largely because Socrates was believed to be associated with the antidemocratic aristocrats who took power in Athens that he was put on trial and executed in 399 BCE. Aristotle’s testimony, therefore, is a valuable reminder that the picture of Socrates bequeathed by Plato should not be accepted uncritically. Above all, if Socrates at some point in his early manhood became the companion of Aspasia – a woman famous as an instructor of eloquence and relationship counsellor – it potentially changes our understanding not only of Socrates’ early life, but of the formation of his philosophical ideas. He is famous for saying: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ But the one thing he claims, in Plato’s Symposium, that he does know about, is love, which he learned about from a clever woman. Might that woman have been Aspasia, once his beloved companion? The real Socrates must remain elusive but, in the statements of Aristotle, Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli, we get intriguing glimpses of a different Socrates from the one portrayed so eloquently in Plato’s writings. Directions for Questions 1 to 5: The passage given above is followed by a set of five questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question. Question 1: From Aristotle's point of view, what would be true?

Socrates is widely considered to be the founding figure of Western philosophy – a thinker whose ideas, transmitted by the extensive writings of his devoted follower Plato, have shaped thinking for more than 2,000 years. ‘For better or worse,’ wrote the Classical scholar Diskin Clay in Platonic Questions (2000), ‘Plato’s Socrates is our Socrates.’ The enduring image of Socrates that comes from Plato is of a man of humble background, little education, few means and unappealing looks, who became a brilliant and disputatious philosopher married to an argumentative woman called Xanthippe. Both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ other principal biographer, were born c424 BCE, so they knew Socrates (born c469 BCE) only as an old man. Keen to defend his reputation from the charges of ‘introducing new kinds of gods’ and ‘corrupting young men’ on which he was eventually brought to trial and executed, they painted a picture of Socrates in late middle age as a pious teacher and unremitting ethical thinker, a man committed to shunning bodily pleasures for higher educational purposes. Yet this clearly idealized picture of Socrates is not the whole story, and it gives us no indication of the genesis of his ideas. Plato’s pupil Aristotle and other Ancient writers provide us with correctives to the Platonic Socrates. For instance, Aristotle’s followers Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli preserve biographical snippets that they might have known from their teacher. From them we learn that Socrates in his teens was intimate with a distinguished older philosopher, Archelaus; that he married more than once, the first time to an aristocratic woman called Myrto, with whom he had two sons; and that he had an affair with Aspasia of Miletus, the clever and influential woman who was later to become the partner of Pericles, a leading citizen of Athens. If these statements are to be believed, a different Socrates emerges: that of a highly placed young Athenian, whose personal experiences within an elevated milieu inspired him to embark on a new style of philosophy that was to change the way people thought ever afterwards. But can we trust these later authors? How could writers two or more generations removed from Socrates’ own time have felt entitled to contradict Plato? One answer is that Aristotle might have derived some information from Plato in person, rather than from his writings, and passed this on to his pupils; another is that, as a member of Plato’s Academy for 20 years, Aristotle might have known that Plato had elided certain facts to defend Socrates’ reputation; a third is that the later authors had access to further sources (oral and written) other than Plato, which they considered to be reliable. Plato’s Socrates is an eccentric. Socrates claimed to have heard voices in his head from youth, and is described as standing still in public places for long stretches of time, deep in thought. Plato notes these phenomena without comment, accepting Socrates’ own description of the voices as his ‘divine sign’, and reporting on his awe-inspiring ability to meditate for hours on end. Aristotle, the son of a doctor, took a more medical approach: he suggested that Socrates (along with other thinkers) suffered from a medical condition he calls ‘melancholy’. Recent medical investigators have agreed, speculating that Socrates’ behaviour was consistent with a medical condition known as catalepsy. Such a condition might well have made Socrates feel estranged from his peers in early life, encouraging him to embark on a different kind of lifestyle. If the received picture of Socrates’ life and personality merits reconsid­eration, what about his thought? Aristotle makes clear in his Metaphysics that Plato misrepresented Socrates regarding the so-called Theory of Forms: Socrates concerned himself with ethics, neglecting the natural world but seeking the universal in ethical matters, and he was the first to insist on definitions. Plato took over this doctrine, but argued that what was universal applied not to objects of sense but to entities of another kind. He thought a single description could not define things that are perceived, since such things are always changing. Unchanging entities he called ‘Forms’… Aristotle himself had little sympathy for such otherwordly views. As a biologist and scientist, he was mainly concerned with the empirical investigation of the world. In his own writings he dismissed the Forms, replacing them with a logical account of universals and their particular instantiations. For him, Socrates was also a more down-to-earth thinker than Plato sought to depict. Sources from late antiquity, such as the 5th-century CE Christian writers Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Cyril of Alexandria, state that Socrates was, at least as a younger man, a lover of both sexes. They corroborate occasional glimpses of an earthy Socrates in Plato’s own writings, such as in the dialogue Charmides where Socrates claims to be intensely aroused by the sight of a young man’s bare chest. However, the only partner of Socrates whom Plato names is Xanthippe; but since she was carrying a baby in her arms when Socrates was aged 70, it is unlikely they met more than a decade or so earlier, when Socrates was already in his 50s. Plato’s failure to mention the earlier aristocratic wife Myrto might be an attempt to minimise any perception that Socrates came from a relatively wealthy background with connections to high-ranking members of his community; it was largely because Socrates was believed to be associated with the antidemocratic aristocrats who took power in Athens that he was put on trial and executed in 399 BCE. Aristotle’s testimony, therefore, is a valuable reminder that the picture of Socrates bequeathed by Plato should not be accepted uncritically. Above all, if Socrates at some point in his early manhood became the companion of Aspasia – a woman famous as an instructor of eloquence and relationship counsellor – it potentially changes our understanding not only of Socrates’ early life, but of the formation of his philosophical ideas. He is famous for saying: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ But the one thing he claims, in Plato’s Symposium, that he does know about, is love, which he learned about from a clever woman. Might that woman have been Aspasia, once his beloved companion? The real Socrates must remain elusive but, in the statements of Aristotle, Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli, we get intriguing glimpses of a different Socrates from the one portrayed so eloquently in Plato’s writings. Directions for Questions 1 to 5: The passage given above is followed by a set of five questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question. Question 2: What is the one thing that Socrates claims to know about?