“... 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 ...”

“... Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, and a famous Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone. After this, George Orwell is discussed with special attention to The Lion and the Unicorn and Albert Camus in relation to the Algerian war. The following three chapters are devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, Marcuse and Foucault. The last author (and the only live one) is ...”

“... In an article on Arthur Koestler written in 1944, George Orwell suggested that the lack of imaginative depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact ...”

“... the loss of empire.But another narrative ‘remains remarkably dominant’, as Kowol says. In 1941 George Orwell published his socialist-patriotic essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, whose arguments were similar to those of J.B. Priestley in the Sunday evening radio broadcasts aired from June to October 1940 which so irritated Churchill that he exerted ...”

“... ways in which it was possible for a writer of this period to be maudit without being a poet. George Orwell, who had been able to read very few of the books, nevertheless contrived to write one of the best pieces on Gissing, and his explanation of the novelist’s wretchedness was that he felt acutely the horrors of life in Late Victorian ...”

“... generous or sentimental enough to fictionalise the relationship. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell gave his friendless, dowdy and self-pitying protagonist, Comstock, one true pal: the editor and patron Ravelston, proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton ...”

“... a kind of tea-break in the intellectual working day. An objection suggests itself, which is that George Orwell wrote about the ‘English national character’, and Orwell was not a man to write to no purpose. But consider what he wrote – viz. that ‘a profound, almost unconscious patriotism and an inability to ...”

“... written by himself and Dashiell Hammett. An explanation of sorts had already been offered by George Orwell. In ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946), he meditated on the apparent passing of the homely crime of murder as it was commonly reported in the British popular press: Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems ...”

“... heard, in all cases, and sometimes touched, tasted or smelled. The mark of Dickens’s writing, George Orwell declared, is the ‘unnecessary detail’. Orwell had in mind the ‘baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it’ on which the company is feasting in The Pickwick Papers while Jack Hopkins tells the ...”

“... mostly fairies, twittering all over the place, screaming “Oh, Lionel!” ’ This may make George Orwell seem rather naive for having made the otherwise useful observation that: ‘how closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is an ...”

“... alleged, but notoriously difficult to prove. (Think of the arguments over whether or not George Orwell ever shot an elephant, or witnessed a hanging, or got beaten at school for wetting his bed.) One may, however, properly and tactfully point to the light and shade, the emphases and suppressions in any autobiographical landscape. In Steedman’s ...”

“... doesn’t seem the likeliest of conjunctions, neither of course does Mr Powell’s connection with George Orwell – described in an earlier volume and recalled here when he chooses the hymns for Orwell’s funeral. In Dru, he found ‘a friend of extraordinary brilliance and subtlety’, as well as efficiency in ...”

“... have worked harder. And although she has proved elusive (there is no evidence, for example, that George Orwell was her lover), and has turned out to be a somewhat off-centre eccentric, they have remained sweet-tempered and continued to gather, research and file their discoveries together. The first result of all this is Virago’s handsome selection of ...”

“... people’ and for socialism itself. We find both tendencies in the architect of the tradition, George Orwell: but at least he had the decency to own up, at least he ‘came out’ as a sentimental and cynical snob. This year we have more contributions to the cartography of class – Beryl Bainbridge’s benign Forever England follows up her television ...”

“... been related in some degree to almost everyone else who was anyone. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell complained that in certain parts of southern England in the 1930s you couldn’t throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop. He might have added that a bishop’s niece couldn’t throw a brick without hitting a great-aunt who was a ...”