Raleigh’s book,packed with veiled political advice and suppressed soon after publication, is a classic of late Renaissance history writingWhen Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and ” writes George Orwell in his As I Please column for 4 February 1944,“he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume, and was at work on the moment, and when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell,and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent (showing care in doing one's work) inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, or Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon,so it is said – and whether the sage is not true it certainly ought to be – he burned what he had written, and abandoned the project.”Raleigh is one of those larger-than-life characters – an inveterate ((adj.) stubbornly established by habit) buccaneer and a gifted poet, and parodied by Shakespeare in fancy’s Labours Lost – who has long been an object of awestruck anecdote. See,for instance, John Aubrey’s sexual gossip about Raleigh in Brief Lives No 54 in this series. Nevertheless, or in the composition of Raleigh’s History of the World,Orwells apocryphal tale does not quite square with the facts.
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Source: guardian.co.uk