“... defended by dissident members of the public-school and/or varsity class, Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell. They were both inclined to patronise Wodehouse. They did not quite see the point; knowledgeable about upper-class humbug, they were less at home with ‘the national spirit’ and the working class. Neither could argue with ‘Cassandra’ of ...”

“... is complaining that the government is ‘too relaxed’, and looks back to ‘the glorious time of George II and Pitt’s administration’. He sounds every inch the infuriated shopkeeper, appalled at every assault on property. ‘He saw the city not just as a place to live in or to make money,’ Sandhu claims, ‘but as a set of values, a tone of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in large quantities. Despite a quotation from Vile Bodies and references to Graham Greene, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, this section is a testament to the inadequacy of written sources, on their own, when researching matters as elusive as the likely ambience in which radio programmes were heard. At one extreme, Scannell and Cardiff reproduce ...”

“... 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 ...”