“... has lived beneath a cloud of gloomy prophecies, but it will not always be so: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have not extinguished hope, or at least the determination to extract some joy from life, however cruel life might be. Security, serenity and success may not necessarily be the goals for which most people will always aim. There may be a future ...”

“... fads and the highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too ...”

“... Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ‘the major contemporary literary theorists’. And if ...”

“... his favourite numbers from Gilbert and Sullivan, as he manufactures his own myth. The young idler George Melvin in ‘The Villain-Worshipper’ is bowled over by the thought of him: ‘That’s the man for my money … Stingaree, sir, is the greatest chap in all these colonies, and deserves to be viceroy when they get Federation.’ But Stingaree persuades ...”

“... than one dining-club, Hart-Davis was occupied in editing such works as the collected letters of George Moore, Max Beerbohm – above all, Oscar Wilde – and later, now for many years past, in correcting the proofs of my own books with precision and severity. The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962) constitutes an achievement altogether unusual in its field of ...”

“... Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Unless clearly backed by an important publishing house or journal, as with ...”

“... cannot take us directly into the minds and feelings of ‘the common people’. But latterly George Orwell has become a handy resource for historians searching for pep. From now on, they had better read Beatrix Campbell before snatching a splendidly written sentence from The Road to Wigan Pier or The Lion and the Unicorn. ‘Nearly fifty years ago a ...”

“... his writings than ‘ordinary’. In his highly enjoyable memoir, The Unexpected Professor (2014), Orwell appears as one of his great heroes, as an essayist at least: for Carey, his genius lay in ‘giving life back its ordinariness’ and basing his judgments on ‘the life most people led’. In this spirit Swift is praised in A Little History of Poetry for ...”

“... names a mention of Shakespeare prompts a reference to Plato, followed by John Stuart Mill, with George Orwell and Lewis Carroll bringing up the rear. Then come ten sections on the naming of birds, the ninth dealing with those named after people. He mentions my favourite of these, the ground-dwelling forest cisticola with a rufous face, throat and ...”

“... London at weekends in donkey jackets and Doc Martens: ‘I heard some people say it was Doing-The-George-Orwell-Thing.’ (The intolerance of other styles, the quick, slick condemnations are among the worst characteristics of public schoolboys.) With Etonians, says Watkins, ‘there was no grey zone. You either were or you ...”

“... expert grip, and to keep meaning under control. They are secrets, not mysteries. Graham Greene and George Orwell may have been closer models for McEwan (I am thinking of the scene in Down and Out in Paris and London, when Orwell, in the doss-house, is woken up ‘by a dim impression of some large brown thing coming ...”

“... thing is that he goes into New York with a scrubby chin, looking perfectly foul.’ He described George Orwell (whom he met in 1944) as a ‘gentleman beachcomber’. Wodehouse’s writerly fans include some of the arch-blimps of Eng. Lit.: Hilaire Belloc called him ‘the best writer of English now alive . . . the head of my profession’; Evelyn ...”

“... Thomas Burke called it ‘the finest “horror” short story in English’.A century later, George Orwell thought the quality of murder was on the slide. ‘Decline of the English Murder’, a glum little piece written for Tribune in 1946, blamed this development on the combined influences of war and America. Murders were formerly a product of ...”

“... and foreign diplomats, who were often told things concealed from the British public.Like George Orwell and several other establishment rebels, Claud Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his ...”

“... influence of a good smoke on the writing capacities of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Compton Mackenzie, he poses the large question whether ‘with abstainers multiplying, we may soon have to ask whether literature is going to become impossible – or has already begun to be impossible.’ It’s increasingly obvious, as ...”