“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Greene inflicted on Scobie – let alone Jesus – in The Heart of the Matter (1948) repelled George Orwell. He accused Greene of being a spiritual snob, who had turned Hell into ‘a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only’. Even sharper criticism came from his fellow Catholics. Evelyn Waugh called Scobie’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... packed every night. The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books’.Now, at the end of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and had high hopes of political advancement, but these came crashing down when in 1916 Lloyd George’s coalition offered his father a peerage to reward his philanthropy and his newspapers’ longstanding support of the Conservative cause. Waldorf was furious when his father accepted, because he would have to succeed him as the second Baron Astor, which ...”

“... had an inset of a dozen or so grainy photographs. They offered shocking visual confirmation of Orwell’s already shocking text. There were the bent figures scavenging for loose coal on slag heaps, the squashy-faced women and children crowded into damp basements, the cloth-capped unemployed men leaning against lampposts. These are the canonical images of ...”

“... a dream, and they could still keep alive, if in the past conditional, that promise of happiness. George Sand reported to Flaubert that the younger people she knew were dismayed by the book: ‘They didn’t recognise themselves in it, they who haven’t yet lived. But they have illusions, and they say: Why does this man, so good, so loveable, so gay, so ...”

“... Left Opposition intellectuals – and for its role as a canary in the Stalinist mineshaft, as Orwell records in Homage to Catalonia, a memoir of his time in Spain, most of it spent at the front as a member of the POUM’s ill-equipped military detachments. In Barcelona, Charles Orr worked for the party’s English-language bulletin and broadcast news in ...”

“... Bear of that night sky being the series of novels lit by the round English gentleman, spymaster George Smiley, he who wipes his glasses with the thick end of his unfailing tie. Among the features of these spy stories is a concern with patriotism and uncertainty, not least with the uncertainties of patriotism. There are passages which can be hard to ...”