“... girlfriends and wives (some of them bigamous).Back in 1980, Bernard Crick began his Life of George Orwell by imploring English biographers to be honest, to confess when they didn’t know something about their subject instead of veering off into fiction. They took little notice. Schneer is endearingly open about the holes in the exceedingly ...”

“... dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’. British readers will remember that George Orwell, some eighty years later, suggested in his blunt, offensive way that Americans ought to add to this proposition: ‘not counting niggers’. It would be quite wrong, of course, to use Orwell’s sarcasm ...”

“... the country to its true identity and rid it of the evils of ‘foreign’, i.e. liberal, ideas. As George Orwell observed at the time, ‘the military mutiny ... was an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.’ But by 1975 there were few Spaniards outside the narrow world of the Armed Forces who were still pining for the 16th ...”

“... tech corridors or tourism. In this mode, urban history melds into the kind of reportage George Orwell and J.B. Priestley wrote a hundred years ...”

“... to the concept of totalitarianism as developed by Hannah Arendt and popularised in fiction by George Orwell. Freidenberg as a scholar was well grounded in the German philosophical tradition out of which Arendt’s writing sprang – but she appears not to have read Arendt or any other Western writer on totalitarianism, or even to have known the ...”

“... be – so that the millennial apocalypse be fulfilled.Somewhat analogous has been the impact of George Orwell’s most famous book. For the past thirty-five years, no one could so much as mention the date 1984 without triggering off, deliberately or involuntarily, a reference to the apocalyptic horrors of Airstrip One. That era is now at an ...”

“... say ‘shibboleth’ properly. The rebels of 1381 carried banners displaying the cross of St George, only recently appointed patron saint of England.The fate of the Flemings was remembered by Chaucer when he wrote ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ only a few years later. The priest says of a noisy fox hunt: ‘Jack Straw and his men/Never shouted half so ...”

“... self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying ...”

“... allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated hyperbole, praised Pritchett’s criticism by saying ...”

“... diaries, and one of the prompts for writing them. Her family are an echelon or two below what George Orwell, an old Etonian, called in The Road to Wigan Pier the ‘lower-upper-middle-class’, his family’s shabby-genteel world peopled by clerics, servicemen and Anglo-Indian officials who were reduced to living on ‘virtually working-class ...”

“... hard and Muggeridge had every excuse to do what paid the bills. It is even possible to imagine George Orwell doing the same – but not to imagine him not worying about it, or regarding such an injunction as good advice. No real writer can think of his writing as something separated from his essential being. It shouldn’t be necessary to state such ...”

“... traitor, though the establishment had more trouble in getting used to the transition than George Orwell, who lost no time in denouncing Bernal’s Stalinism and ‘slovenly style’. Somewhat surprisingly, he was even so asked in 1945-46 to calculate the relative military effort needed to knock out the USSR, the USA and Britain in a future ...”

“... and character sketches allow Meyers to dwell on his previous subjects: he has already tackled Orwell, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Edmund Wilson, among many others. But his obsessive cross-referencing also seems aimed at elevating Maugham by association. Meyers dismisses his weaker efforts, and even quotes some of the lines that drew ...”

“... as soon as he had finished writing it, and he later dropped it from his oeuvre, though not before George Orwell had said that the line about ‘the necessary murder’ epitomised the collaboration of ‘the gangster and the pansy’, adding that ‘so much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is ...”

“... of that belief. The story of the Spanish Civil War is one of disillusionment. That was Orwell’s model and it hasn’t been superseded. Orwell arrived in Barcelona as a reporter for the New Leader in December 1936, and what he saw – ‘a town where the working class was in the saddle’, where men and women ...”