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“... British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to ...”

“... hortatory prose broadly regarded, there is any name that stands more securely than that of Herbert George Wells between those of Thomas Carlyle and ...”

“... same kindly, anti-ideological, instinctive Social Democrats whom that archetypal Social Democrat, George Orwell, celebrated forty years ago; and, as every British prime minister from Churchill to Callaghan has known in his bones, they can be governed successfully only from a social-democratic position. If a new consensus does replace the ruined ‘Attlee ...”

“... into a patchwork of target areas with competition driving standards down rather than up. It was George Orwell who went beyond the Cortez pose of intellectual wonder at the vast unknown expanse of popular reading. The content of the small newsagent’s shop, he declared, ‘is the best available indication of what the mass of the English people really ...”

“... terrible things’. They discuss the possibility of a particularly grim coupling between Smith and George Orwell in a London park, and link this lightly and improbably with her verses about liking to be ‘tightly kissed’. They also report that she claimed to have been pursued by Orwell – with an uncertain degree of ...”

“... George Orwell saw the patriotism of the British working class as an almost unconscious link with the middle and upper classes: ‘Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together, and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf’ (The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941 ...”

“... intensely irritating; he pours scorn on it – too stridently, he now confesses – in an essay on Orwell and Henry Miller called ‘Outside the Whale’. Arnold visits the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse and contemplates it through the lens of his famous melancholy. The new world powerless to be born was that foreseen in the heroic but failed efforts of ...”

“... of a clever young psychologist. Sonia Brownell also worked on Horizon, resisting the advances of George Orwell until his terminal illness and the great success of 1984. Connolly tended to implore the previous lady to take him back after it was too late. He and Barbara Skelton quarrelled violently in the car on the way to their wedding and their way back ...”

“... remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... religion, Yeats could not. He could only hope for it and call it the 13th Cycle. As early as 1943 George Orwell had speculated about the connections between Yeats’s authoritarian politics and his interest in occultism. It is useful to be able to see this essay again in the company of Eliot, Tate and, above all, Richard Ellmann, whose 1954 elucidation ...”

“... memoirs in which he offers views of himself and other people. Four Absentees portrays brilliantly George Orwell, Eric Gill, Middleton Murry and Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man is an acidly amusing account of his twenty-odd years as a radio producer, and the more directly autobiographical The Intellectual Part offers agreeably ...”

“... old doodlebug’, which gave everyone a chance to bolt for cover when the engine cut out. George Orwell in Tribune said that what depressed him about V-2s was ‘the way they set people talking about the next war’, when no doubt rockets would be fired across the Atlantic. It was odd that no rocket dropped on the ‘square mile’ of the City of ...”

“... 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 ...”