A chara, - In her column "Loose Leaves" (June 28th), Sadbh writes about the inclusion by George Orwell of Peadar O'Donnell on a list of 38 people he furnished to the British Foreign Office in 1949 as Communist sympathisers. She notes how both Orwell and O'Donnell found themselves in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
Some years earlier, Orwell was among the first literary figures to identify W.B. Yeats as a Fascist. He found in Yeats "a rather sinister vision of life", though acknowledging that "by and large the best writers of our time have been reactionary in tendency". Orwell commented that Yeats reached Fascism "by the aristocratic route".
In my current book, W.B. Yeats: Vain, Glorious, Lout. A Maker of Modern Ireland, I rebut Orwell's charges against Yeats for several reasons: among them Yeats's positive response to an invitation to a Writers' Congress held in Madrid in 1937 to defend the Spanish Republic. - Is mise,
TONY JORDAN, Gilford Road, Dublin 4.