India, May 31 -- 1How does your experience as an international human rights lawyer help you as an author? I was a lawyer briefly, and a bad one. I was very young when I stopped. What has stayed with me is the training in trying to identify the very heart of an issue so that one can ask the right questions. I have also retained a sense of what lawyers call natural justice, which means that one has to consider the opposing view, to make sure that one is being fair. This approach has been very important in all my work. 2Lawyers are also trained to dig up dirt on people, which you do well with this book. (Laughs) Digging up dirt on author George Orwell was not my aim but I was very shocked at what I found. I do think that he was a repressed homosexual. There is a lot of evidence for that. He co-wrote the novella Animal Farm with his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. It was her idea to write that book, and her voice is very much in it. It looks like she saved Orwell's life during the Spanish Civil War too. I also didn't know that he was so enormously unfaithful to Eileen. Besides all this, he was a bit reckless with his own life and with others' lives as well. 3What drew you to Eileen? Everybody loved her and I think I know why. One of her friends was a novelist and wrote her into a character in a novel. Eileen had an ability to listen deeply. She made people feel seen and heard. She had the generosity of spirit to think about something from someone else's point of view. She could sense how they were feeling. 4If you could plan a day out with Eileen, where would you take her? I live in Sydney, so I would take her for a long walk along the clifftops and the beach. I would ask her a lot of questions. I want to know how much she loved Orwell, though one can never quantify love. She was the one who took up jobs to support them financially. She worked with the Department of Censorship in the Ministry of Information in London during World War 2. The ministries that Orwell writes about in 1984 were informed by her work. 5Was Eileen bitter about Orwell taking credit for her work? I don't think that she was bitter. She was extremely intelligent. Once, she said that Orwell had "a remarkable political simplicity" whereas she was a sophisticated political thinker. A biographer quoted her as saying that he had "a remarkable political sympathy". Biographers changed the words because they could not bear their hero, Orwell, to have a wife who was cleverer. I think Eileen was happy that she was improving his work. Of course, she was pleased with Animal Farm. It really is an almost-perfect novel. And Orwell and Eileen wrote it together....