“... salvation, but a condition unavoidably endured with little prospect of relief. It may well be, as George Bernard Shaw once put it, that ‘the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty,’ but it is easier to express outrage at its existence than to raise hopes as to its eradication. The history of the world is the history of many things, but in ...”

“... be a ‘naturalistic’ writer in some respects, but neither Zola nor Gorky are useful exemplars. George Orwell, also cited here and there as a point of reference, is a little closer, since he, too, wrote about the people at the bottom of the heap. But Orwell is remote from MacGill in almost every possible way, save ...”

“... deans, and all the trappings of authority. He had the temperament, and many of the attitudes, of George Orwell, and his family background was similar. ‘Phony’ was a favourite word of his, freely applied to anyone whose status or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von ...”

“... more than enough free-floating material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as ...”

“... out.’ (According to Lewis, incidentally, this fat man/thin man trope was probably lifted from George Orwell.) The worst of them – indeed the average – now seem pompous and banal: ‘No one can make us hate ourselves like an admirer’; ‘All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on other ...”

“... Macaulay lasted four years and Maine six. India could provoke radicalism: take Annie Besant or George Orwell. Or it could harden conservatism. But liberal designs for India always sounded better in London than they did in Calcutta. Very few survived the long journey east. Gnarled, no-nonsense company colonels dominate Mount’s book. Their India has ...”

“... it causes is usually chronic. The age of the celebrity sufferer or victim is long since over: George Orwell, Vivien Leigh and Eleanor Roosevelt were the last. It is not surprising, then, that it’s hard to attract media attention to tuberculosis. Every day, more than five thousand people die from the disease, most of them young adults, yet it barely ...”

“... One, a novel, may be called ‘Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton’ (Home is not a fan of George Orwell), and samples passages from classic London literature, reworked to make each paragraph exactly 100 words long. Another is called ‘Memphis Underground’, and is set in London, Orkney and North Africa. And the third is a short volume called ...”

“... people who had to survive them (rather than by relying on the writings of the Old Etonian George Orwell) knows that even for those who weren’t permanently unemployed it was a desperate business of one short-lived job after another – a bouncer this week, a bottle-washer next week – and of ducking and dodging, a great deal of it at or beyond ...”

“... were still more apparent in the actions he did not take. As Churchill had shown, and Lloyd George before him, 10 Downing Street could serve as the headquarters of a revolution in government. 1945 was meant to be the start of a great and lasting experiment in social and economic affairs. It was a moment when a prime minister of the calibre of Dalton or ...”

“... to it, along with the retired army sergeant next door who had been East and seen a thing or two. George Orwell offers a sharper insight into the meaning of ‘post-truth’ in his reflections on the success of pro-Franco propaganda in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. ‘I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies ...”

“... the rediscovery of patriotism by the British intelligentsia. Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene and George Orwell all undertook patriotic work for the BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely national’. ‘Our culture,’ he ...”

“... unpredictable ways, and they speak even when we are silent. ‘Dressed in a tramp’s clothes,’ George Orwell, quoted by Judith Watt, observed, ‘it is very difficult ... not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.’ The hope that a change of clothes will actually redress our situation is not therefore entirely vain, in either sense of the word. In ...”

“... too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. George Orwell gave us a similar vision of an unyielding pathway in 1984. The inability to affect our fate is the bogey of the 20th century. The technological triumphs of the 19th century have become our machine-models of behaviour and human potential. We are ...”

“... to soap and, especially, hot water which increasingly differentiated them from the middle classes. George Orwell (born 1903) was, notoriously, taught as a child that ‘the lower classes smell.’ ‘Very early in life,’ he wrote, ‘you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body’; and he quoted Somerset ...”