The character has earned a legacy as a
clichéd phrase –
reactionary opinions are often characterised as "Colonel Blimp" statements.
Frank Percy Crozier referred to Colonel Blimp in his anti-war book
The Men I Killed (1937).
George Orwell and
Tom Wintringham made especially extensive use of the term "Blimps" to refer to this type of military officer, Orwell in his articles and Wintringham in his books
How to Reform the Army and ''People's War
. In his 1941 essay "The Lion and the Unicorn", Orwell referred to two important sub-sections of the middle class, one of which was the military and imperialistic middle class, nicknamed the Blimps, and characterised by the "half-pay (i.e retired) colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain". He added that they had been losing their vitality during the past thirty years, "writhing impotently under the changes that were happening". E. M. Forster used the term "Colonel Blimp" to describe Britons with a low opinion of Indian culture. Herbert Read also used the term to describe people who were strongly hostile to modern art. The history book Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform'' (1950) by
E. S. Turner was ironically dedicated to "Colonel Blimp", and reprinted a Low cartoon of Blimp next to the dedication: Turner's book described traditionalist politicians who opposed
humanitarian reforms as "Colonel Blimp figures". The term "Blimp" continues to be referenced from time to time. In a 1994 article published in
The New York Review of Books,
John Banville recalled a televised exchange between an elderly lady and
Kingsley Amis as "an endearing moment, in which one glimpsed the warm and funny man that Amis used to be before he decided, some time in the 1960s, to turn himself into a literary Colonel Blimp". In a 2006 book, historian
Christopher Clark used the term "blimpish" to characterise the
Prussian
Field Marshal von Mollendorf (1724–1816), who distinguished himself as an officer in the
Seven Years' War but whose conservatism and opposition to military reform were considered to have contributed to Prussia's defeat in the
Battle of Jena in 1806. In his review of ''
Garner's Modern American Usage'',
David Foster Wallace referred to the "Colonel Blimp's rage" of
prescriptivist journalists like
William Safire. The graphic novel series
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which depicts numerous literary characters interacting with each other, includes
Horatio Blimp as an overconfident
British Army major who commands the initial strike against the
Martian invaders of
H. G. Wells'
The War of the Worlds. ==Film==