Richardson, who has a daughter, Daisy, with her ex, film producer Tim Bevan, agrees. Everyone's lives changed irrevocably after Natasha's death, she says.
Although Orwell's journalism for the Tribune carried an anti-Soviet strain which irritated much of the readership during the wartime alliance, he was glad to have Bevan's support.
He took the job of literary editor at the Tribune, a left-wing weekly newspaper launched in 1937 with financial backing from Stafford Cripps and edited by the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan.