Great Expectations No.3 The Lioness and the Unicorn:

For Alessia Russo (Bearsted)

First Edition of Orwell Book & Russo England Away Shirt

Not for Sale

Born in Maidstone, Alessia Russo began playing football at a young age in a family of athletes. Her middle brother, Giorgio, has played non-league football for various teams, including Ramsgate. Alessia played for Bearsted F.C. Girls U10 as a child before moving on to Chelsea and then to Brighton and Hove. She moved to the United States to play college soccer, joining ACC team North Carolina Tar Heels in 2017. On returning to England she joined Manchester United the club she supported growing up. Her Sicilian grandfather moved to England in the 1950s and became a fan of Manchester United. He passed this on to his children and grandchildren. In 2023 Alessia joined Arsenal.

For England Russo was part of the team that won the UEFA Women's Euros 2022. She ended the tournament with four goals, the fourth an audacious back-heel between the legs of Sweden keeper Hedvig Lindahl in the semi-final. On 15th of January 2024 she was named in the FIFPRO World XI at The Best FIFA Football Awards.

George Orwell wrote the Lion and the Unicorn in 1941, it has gone on to become an important essay for those looking for a progressive form of patriotism.

“England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

In 1931, Orwell made the trip to Kent to work as a Hop-picker. His experiences appeared in his novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, but they were also turned into an essay, ‘Hop-Picking’, for the New Statesman and Nation.

Read Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn here