Understatement

Derb, noting the 60th anniversary of the death of George Orwell, engages in a bit of British understatement (emphasis mine):

Orwell was tubercular from an early age. Writing of his prep-school days: "I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung which was not discovered till many years later. Hence I not only had a chronic cough, but running was a torment to me." Things certainly got much worse in those last three years, though. His habit of chain-smoking home-rolled cigarettes, made with the coarsest shag he could find, while living in a drafty stone house on the damp side of Scotland, probably didn't help.