All Orwell’s writings – and, with their accompanying notes, they run to some 9,000 pages – are to be found in The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, 1998; second paperback edition, 2000–2 (Orwell’s books take up the first nine volumes and are also published by Penguin with the same pagination); The Facsimile of the Manuscript of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, published in 1984; and the volume supplementary to The Complete Works published in 2006: The Lost Orwell, ed. Peter Davison. The texts reproduced in this selection are drawn from the above volumes but I have regularised Orwell’s idiosyncratic spellings (marked by ˚ in those volumes) and Anglicized most American spellings. Often only sections of the Tribune ‘As I Please’ columns and the ‘London Letters’ to Partisan Review have been selected; in the main the ensuing correspondence (often voluminous to Tribune) is not reprinted. The complete texts and the correspondence that arose will be found in Complete Works. Titles for extracts from ‘As I Please’ columns and from the ‘London Letters’ have been provided by the editor unless stated otherwise.
Penguin Books have published four collections of essays which I also edited; these have notes additional to those in Complete Works and each volume includes one of Orwell’s books. They are:
Orwell in Spain (with Homage to Catalonia), 393 pages
Orwell’s England (with The Road to Wigan Pier), 432 pages with 32 pages of plates
Orwell and the Dispossessed (with Down and Out in Paris and London), 424 pages Orwell and Politics (with Animal Farm), 537 pages
Reference might also be made to the companion volumes to this collection, Orwell: Diaries, 2009, and Orwell: A Life in Letters, 2010.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes, 1968, are now out of print. Two volumes of essays drawn from my edition were published by Harcourt Inc. in New York, ed. George Packer, in 2008: Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art is Propaganda.
References to the Complete Works are by volume number + page(s); e.g. XX, 100–2. References to books listed below are by the author’s name + page number. There is a vast number of studies of Orwell and many are out of print and difficult to find locally. I have in the main restricted those listed to books recently published.
Gordon Bowker, George Orwell, Little Brown, 2000.
Jacintha Buddicom, Eric & Us (1974), second edition with an important Postscript by Dione Venables, Finlay Publishing, Chichester, 2006.
Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick, Orwell Remembered, Ariel (BBC), 1984.
Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel, OUP, 2013.
Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, Secker & Warburg, 1980; Penguin, 1992 (with important new appendix). As Crick.
Scott Lucas, Orwell, Haus Publishing, 2003.
Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, Norton, NY, 2000.
Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography, Harper Collins, NY, 1991; William Heinemann, London, 1991.
Hilary Spurling, The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell, Hamish Hamilton, 2002.
D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life, Chatto & Windus, 2003.
John Thompson, Orwell’s London (with many photographs by Philippa Scoones), Fourth Estate, 1984 (as Thompson).
Stephen Wadhams, Remembering Orwell, Penguin Canada, 1984.
Philip Bounds, Orwell & Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell, I.B. Taurus, 2009.
Thomas Cushman and John Rodden, George Orwell: Into the Twenty-first Century, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 2004.
Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory, Allen Lane (as Why Orwell Matters in USA), 2002.
Douglas Kerr, George Orwell, Northcote House: Writers and their Work, 2003.
Emma Larkin, Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, John Murray, 2004.
Daniel J. Leab, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden, CUP, 2007.
John Rodden, Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings, University of Texas, Austin, 2006.
John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell, OUP, 1989.
Loraine Saunders, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from ‘Burmese Days’ to ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2008.
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 1961; third Penguin edn., 1997.
Orwell Society: www.orwellsociety.com – site of the Orwell Society which issues a Newsletter. The site has an index of articles it has published and events.
Orwell Prize website: www.theorwellprize.co.uk