December 20, 2025

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.

George Orwell (Eric Blair, 1903–1950), British novelist and essayist, The Sporting Spirit (1945), in The Cynic’s Lexicon, Jonathon Green, ed. (London: 1986), p.160

What further proof do you need that politics is a serious sport?

If the battle of Waterloo was won by the British on the playing fields of Eton (as the Duke of Wellington claimed), we can now better understand what he meant, Orwell being an old Etonian. Then again, others would more correctly claim it was won when the Prussians—British allies, arrived late on the scene, and turned the tide against Napoleon and the French.