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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... greatly intensified since 11 September 2001. Its future was prepared by the non-election of George W. Bush in 2000, equivalent to the failed coronation of a pope in 1000. Simultaneously, the persistence of 1990s neoliberal science fiction (Homo economicus etc) provided some conceptual continuity for the usurper’s regime. Then, on the back of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... or mesmerised (perhaps assumed for fun), that hardly does him justice. He often reminded me of George Orwell, not in feature so much as a kind of hesitancy of manner, thinking for a second or two of what had been said, but he had none of Orwell’s wish to set the world right, and his laughter was quite ...”

“... left-wing thinker. The second was myself, though I believe that Jeremy, an anti-Etonian in the George Orwell mode, was re-inventing me as an image of his ideal self. He had spent two years as a naval officer on the intensive inter-Services Russian course, cut off from normal life. I came from a lower middle-class background, had encountered my first ...”

“... under the hammer, the miner also came to occupy the symbolic space of Vulcan at the forge. For George Orwell, in his sulphurous account of underground labour, ‘the line of halfnaked kneeling men’ looked as though they had been forged out of iron. Famously, he thrilled to the spectacle of their wide shoulders tapering to splendid supple ...”

“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”

“... in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George L.K. Morris, artist, art critic and moneybags for the new venture. Despite Morris’s largesse, most of the editors and all of the contributors were at first unpaid. For a young writer, however, appearing in the magazine offered recognition and social ...”