“... 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 ...”

“... The young Hector was brought up in Devonshire by two supposedly harsh, repressive aunts. Like George Orwell, he served briefly in the Burma police. Invalided out, he was next seen as a near-dandy and struggling writer in London, somewhat given to practical joking. He was also given to what his sister Ethel, who burned his letters after 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 ...”

“... crucifixions. ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,’ George Orwell wrote (in a quite different context). ‘No ordinary man could be such a fool.’ Despite such gymnastics, Ruse’s attempt at a reconciliation ultimately fails – not surprisingly, given that it requires us to accept a version of Darwinism so ...”

“... that he intends to appoint one of his acolytes to be governor instead of giving ‘Steady Eddie’ George a further term and letting the markets know it sooner rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from ...”

“... of imprisonment and the firing-squad. Empathy, as Bernard Crick pointed out in his biography of George Orwell, is no substitute for evidence. The assumption that one can enter so completely into another person’s mind may endow a scholarly biography with the undertones of a romantic novelette: ‘The fear that she had destroyed Jogiches haunted ...”

“... from British India. Some also campaigned against economic exploitation. ‘If we are honest,’ George Orwell wrote, ‘it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.’ Firms in London and Glasgow grew fat on profits from the export of Burmese rice, oil and timber while ordinary villagers sank into poverty. In 1937 ...”

“... as well as much hostility to working-class culture and amusements – voiced, for example, by George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and the Scrutiny group gathered round F.R. Leavis. Alarm concerning the pernicious influence of Hollywood on working-class youth was matched by fear of football rowdyism both on and off the pitch. In 1936 the Football Association ...”

“... Constable.’ In 1991 Greene died and Michael Shelden published his authorised biography of George Orwell. Both these events gave Shelden greater freedom to write a book about Greene. There could no longer be thunderous telegrams from Antibes or anywhere else, and now that the albatross of one subject had dropped off his neck he had time, space and ...”

“... he bewailed the way things were going, he hated modern England. In the late Forties, by when George Orwell was confiding to friends that he ‘loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future’, Hartley, a most un-Orwellian figure, was routinely and predictably saying the same. Satire was the last thing he could do well. Facial Justice, a ...”

“... has a very grand tradition in England, and though the subject failed to catch the attention of George Orwell, it might have been a nice thing if it had, given its place in England’s emotional life at every level and in every class. Orwell was an old Etonian, so he knew all about that, but he also spent a certain ...”

“... Wildean epigrams with boarding-school japery, plus comments on various contemporaries, such as George Orwell (‘a very queer bird’) or Stephen Spender (‘he seems to like himself as a chairman, and indeed as a public speaker altogether’) or his hosts at University College in Bangor (‘The Moses Williams’s are nice, even though he is a ...”

“... of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At least not necessarily more tragic or wasted than ...”

“... Quakers, pacifist vicars, street people, students, the vegetarians and sandal-wearers detested by George Orwell, even retired military officers. I favoured getting AWOLs out to the provinces, where they seemed more comfortable than in metropolitan London. Deserters saw themselves as, and were, the ‘niggers’ of the antiwar movement, which by and large ...”

“... to the avowedly nostalgic John Betjeman. Likewise, we get no more than a brief sidelong glimpse of George Orwell. So be it. Let’s say that Harris’s concern is with a certain strand of artistic production, rather than with an overarching historical narrative. She has chosen Romantic Moderns as her title because she believes that in all her favourite ...”