The Essential Orwell
Frank Kermode, 22 January 1981
Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s
edited by Frank Gloversmith.
Harvester, 285 pp., £20, July 1980,0 85527 938 9 Show More
edited by Frank Gloversmith.
Harvester, 285 pp., £20, July 1980,
Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties
edited by Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee.
Lawrence and Wishart, 279 pp., £3.50, March 1980,0 85315 419 8 Show More
edited by Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee.
Lawrence and Wishart, 279 pp., £3.50, March 1980,
“... Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain ... ”
