Essays

This outstanding collection brings together Orwell’s longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes My Country Right or Left , Decline of the English Murder , Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging.

With great originality and wit Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from the moral enormity of Jonathan Swift’s strange genius and a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, a comic yet profound discussion of naughty sea-side picture postcards and a spirited defence of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose style, Orwell’s essays challenge, move and entertain.

Contents:

Why I Write

The Spike

A Hanging

Shooting an Elephant

Bookshop Memories

Marrakech

Charles Dickens

Boys' Weeklies

Inside the Whale

My Country Right or Left

The Lion and the Unicorn

Wells, Hitler and the World State

The Art of Donald McGill

Rudyard Kipling

Looking Back on the Spanish War

W.B. Yeats

Poetry and the Microphone

Benefit of Clergy; Some Notes on Salvador Dali

Raffles and Miss Blandish

Arthur Koestler

Antisemitism in Britain

In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse

Notes on Nationalism

Good Bad Books

The Sporting Spirit

Nonsense Poetry

The Prevention of Literature

Books v. Cigarettes

Decline of the English Murder

Politics and the English Language

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray

Confessions of a Book Reviewer

Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels

How the Poor Die

Riding Down from Bangor

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

Such, Such Were the Joys

Writers and Leviathan

Reflections on Gandhi