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“... assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the ...”

“... irrelevantly abstract; much is abominably badly written – convoluted neologisms come badly (did Orwell live in vain?) from those who profess to think in the interests of the common people. But most contemporary Marxists are now vigorously debating (usually among themselves, alas) the question of ‘the relative autonomy of the political’. Take Laski’s ...”

“... all this mad, contagious Shakespearean business is over the top, along with the references to George Orwell because 1984 happened to turn out a key year for McEnroe; not to speak of an extraordinary passage at the end of the book where Evans complains that when McEnroe was recently defaulted in Australia he was given only thirty minutes to prepare ...”

“... is to Asquith, whom he knew well and admired deeply, at least as deeply as he detested Lloyd George. It may be that the expression of antipathy is a better test of style and temper than eulogy. MacCarthy has a piece on Disraeli that would surely have been impermissible in a dedicated Liberal of a later generation. He finds it absurd that anybody should ...”

“... Cri) was opposite, on the other side of Piccadilly Circus. In ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell wrote of their heyday before the First World War in softer tones: ‘crazy millionaires in curly top hats and lavender waistcoats’, champagne parties and slang, ‘chocs and cigs and ripping and topping and heavenly … divvy weekends at ...”

“... in his introduction, is that no modern English writer can ‘hold a candle’ to Dickens or George Eliot. Born in 1960, Taylor has now written two books on post-war English fiction – the first was A Vain Conceit (1989) – expounding the Victorian values that he first acquired (as he now tells us) when reading Dombey and Son in his father’s ...”

“... are, in fact, Lys, née Dunlap, then Lubbock, then Connolly, then Koch; Sonia, née Brownell, then Orwell, then Pitt-Rivers; Janetta, née Woolley, then Slater, then Kee, then Jackson, then Parladé; and Barbara, née Skelton, then Connolly, then Weidenfeld, then Jackson.There are several similarities between these four women: they were all born around the ...”

“... 1929. The old-age pension, introduced twenty years earlier, was still only ten shillings a week. George Orwell hadn’t imagined that anyone could live on it, but when he went slumming he discovered that people did, thanks to a diet of bread, margarine and tea, dirt-cheap lodgings and clothes from charities. By now, the unemployed could draw insurance ...”

“... George Orwell is commonly invoked as the ideal role model for the intellectual: feisty, independent, outspoken and contrarian, active in the public sphere, and famous. So it’s a surprise to learn that the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which most of his essays appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading ...”

“... extended conception of fairy story. That Hideous Strength is at times curiously akin in feeling to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which in fact it preceded by four years, and it is perhaps significant that Orwell is the only novelist not broadly in Lewis’s own tradition to receive substantial notice in Father ...”

“... which was a dominating feature during the war. Now this, too, has vanished from existence. George Orwell was a recruit for it. I never thought much of Orwell, who has, I think, faded away again now that we have got safely through 1984, or nearly so. Maclaren-Ross has a special interest for me. He haunted the ...”

“... away from the sea but not so far from his one-time prep school, St Cyprian’s. There he had met George Orwell and Cecil Beaton, and the three began to develop their characteristic talents: Orwell by reading Gulliver’s Travels and brooding satirically on the horrors to be enshrined later in Such, Such Were the ...”

“... Virginia, took place before a crowd of fifteen thousand in 1811 and was immortalised in a print by George Cruikshank. This did not deter the National Sporting Club more than a hundred years later, in 1929, from instituting the first formal colour bar in Britain, stipulating that future contestants for the Lonsdale Belt ‘must be legally British subjects born ...”

“... Writing at the end of the Thirties, George Orwell remarked that the British ruling class had decayed so much that the time had come ‘when stuffed shirts like Eden and Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent’: It was an unfair comment, though not so unfair as his description of Baldwin as ‘a hole in the air’: yet it conveyed the view, subsequently shared by many, that with Eden the facade was more important than the interior, the appearance more impressive than the reality ...”

“... of Shanghai materialises a few miles from his Shepperton home in the filming of Empire of the Sun. George Orwell once said to me, apropos of Coming up for air, that first person narration should always be avoided. There are obvious exceptions, but this is a pretty good rule where passages of the writer’s life are deeply involved in the fiction, as ...”