Contents

Introduction

POEM: ‘Awake! Young Men of England’

POEM: ‘Our hearts are married, but we are too young’

‘John Flory: My Epitaph’

‘A Farthing Newspaper’

‘How a Nation Is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’

REVIEW: J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement

‘Common Lodging Houses’

POEM: ‘Sometimes in the middle autumn days’

POEM: ‘Summer-like for an instant’

REVIEW: G.K. Chesterton, Criticisms and Opinions of the Works of Charles Dickens

POEM: ‘On a Ruined Farm Near the His Majesty’s Voice Gramophone Factory’

INTRODUCTION to the French Edition of Down and Out in Paris and London

REVIEW: Kenneth Saunders, The Ideals of East and West

REVIEW: Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

‘Rudyard Kipling’

REVIEW: Peter Fleming, News from Tartary

‘In Defence of the Novel’

POEM: ‘A happy vicar I might have been’

‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’

REVIEW: Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit

RESPONSE to ‘Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War’

‘The Lure of Profundity’

REVIEW: Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia

‘Why I Join the I.L.P.’

EXTRACT from ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’

POEM: ‘The Italian soldier shook my hand’

REVIEW: Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

‘Democracy in the British Army’

REVIEW: Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, War Begins at Home

REVIEW: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

‘New Words’

REVIEW: Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties

THEATRE REVIEW: Garrison Theatre

REVIEW: Jim Phelan, Jail Journey

REVIEW: E.L. Grant Wilson, Priest Island

LETTER to Time and Tide: ‘On preparation for imminent invasion’

REVIEW: A.J. Jenkinson, What do Boys and Girls Read?

REVIEWS: Jack London, The Iron Heel; H.G. Wells, When the Sleeper Awakes; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ernest Bramah, The Secret of the League

THEATRE REVIEW: George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple

REVIEW: Sacheverell Sitwell, Poltergeists

THEATRE REVIEW: Applesauce

REVIEW: T.C. Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines: Democracy and the Public Schools

REVIEW: Hadley Cantril, et al., The Invasion from Mars (Orson Welles’s broadcast)

‘Our Opportunity’

‘London Letter’, 3 January 1941: The Political Situation; The Intellectual Life of England; Air raids

FILM REVIEWS: Eyes of the Navy, The Heart of Britain, Unholy War

EXTRACT from The Lion and the Unicorn: ‘Proposed War Aims’

BROADCAST: Frontiers of Art and Propaganda: ‘Literary Criticism’

BROADCAST: ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’

FILM REVIEW: Kipps (H.G. Wells)

‘London Letter’, 1 January 1942: Whom Are We Fighting Against?; Our Allies; Defeatism and German Propaganda; The Literary Front; The Food Situation

‘London Letter’, 8 May 1942: The British Crisis; Churchill’s Position; Sir Stafford Cripps, Attitudes to the USSR

BROADCAST: ‘A Magazine Programme’

BROADCAST: ‘Review on Third Anniversary of Outbreak of the War’

‘Thomas Hardy Looks at War’

‘T.S. Eliot’

LETTER to the Eastern Service Director

BROADCAST: Extracts from Answering You

BROADCAST: ‘Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift’

‘Background of French Morocco’

REVIEW: V.K. Narayana Menon, The Development of William Butler Yeats

BROADCAST: ‘Victories at Rostov and Kharkov’

BROADCAST: ‘Jack London’

Orwell’s last News Review for India

‘Not Enough Money: A Sketch of George Gissing’

REVIEW: Tangye Lean, Voices in the Darkness

‘Three Years of Home Guard: Unique Symbol of Stability’

EXTRACT from ‘London Letter’, 23 May 1943(?): Unexpected Shortages

‘Literature and the Left’

‘The Detective Story’

REVIEW: H.N. Brailsford, Subject India

BROADCAST: ‘Your Questions Answered: Wigan Pier’

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 3 December 1943: Anglo-American Relations in Wartime

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 10 December 1943: Skin Colour and Living Standards; Insulting Nicknames

EXTRACT from ‘London Letter’, 15 January 1944: Parliament; London in Wartime

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 21 January 1944: The BBC; On Being Negative – Woolworth’s Roses

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 28 January 1944: Ezra Pound

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 11 February 1944: Anti-Semitism

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 18 February 1944: The Equalising Effect of Clothes Rationing

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 3 March 1944: Life after Death; Decay in Christian Belief

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 10 March 1944: Dickens and Country Life

LETTER to Victor Gollancz

‘As I Please’, 31 March 1944: On Revenge Killings

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 21 April 1944: Why Borrow Foreign Words?

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 5 May 1944: I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 26 May 1944: The Matrimonial Post

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 11 June 1944: On the Perversion of Book Reviewing

REVIEW: Hilda Martindale, From One Generation to Another

The Orwells Bombed Out, 28 June 1944

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 7 July 1944: The Flying Bomb

EXTRACT from ‘London Letter’, 24 July 1944: Highly Unpopular Subjects

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 11 August 1944: The Colour Bar

REVIEW: Marie Paneth, Branch Street

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 1 September 1944: The Warsaw Uprising

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 15 September 1944: A Paris Taxi-Driver

‘London Letter’, October 1944(?): I Have Tried to Tell the Truth: errors and mistakes

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 24 November 1944: On the Rudeness of Shopkeepers

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 4 December 1944: The V2

REVIEW: L.A.G. Strong, Authorship

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 2 February 1945: Huns and Other Such Names; A V-1 Explosion; The Three Super-states of the Future

‘In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse’

‘Paris Puts a Gay Face on Its Miseries’

‘The French Believe We Have Had a Revolution’

LETTER to Tribune: ‘The Polish Trial’

RESPONSE to ‘Orwell and the Stinkers’

REVIEW: Pierre Maillaud, The English Way

‘The Sporting Spirit’

REVIEW: ‘Freedom and Happiness’ [Yevgeny Zamyatin, We]

‘The Cost of Radio Programmes’

‘Books v. Cigarettes’

REVIEW: Robert Tressall, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists

EXTRACTS from ‘London Letter’, May 1946(?): Scarcity and Despair; The Literary Front – and Birth of the Third Programme

‘The Cost of Letters’

BROADCAST: ‘The Written Word’: The first sustained critical assessment of Orwell’s journalism

‘As I Please’, 15 November 1946: Polish Immigration; On Hanging

‘Riding Down from Bangor’

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 22 November 1946: Intelligence and Popularity of Newspapers

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 29 November 1946: What Is Dominant: a Desire for Power or for Wealth?

‘As I Please’, 6 December 1946: Trilby and Anti-Semitism; Authors’ Decline; Four-letter Words

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 13 December 1946: Expenditure on Alcohol, Tobacco and Books; Soviet and US positions at United Nations

‘As I Please’, 20 December 1946: Overindulging at Christmas

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 3 January 1947: The Gap Between Function and Reward on a Luxury Liner; Persecution of Writers in USSR

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 7 February 1947: The fate of Burmese Minorities; H.G. Wells on Printing Errors

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 14 February 1947: Poles in Scotland; Scottish Nationalism

‘As I Please’, 28 February 1947: Handwriting and Creative Writing

EXTRACT from ‘As I Please’, 14 March 1947: Rationalised Spelling and Imperial Measure

EXTRACTS from ‘As I Please’, 28 March 1947: Mass Observation; Seeking Spring

‘In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus’

REVIEW: James Laughlin, ed., Spearhead: Ten Years’ Experimental Writing in America

REVIEW: Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

REVIEW: Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite

REVIEW: T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

‘Evelyn Waugh’

Last of Orwell’s Statements on 1984

Orwell’s Death, 21 January 1950

Appendix I: Passage cut by Orwell from final text of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Appendix II: Estimates of Orwell’s Earnings, 1922–45

Selective Chronology

A Short List of Further Reading

Acknowledgements

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