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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”