Orwell was a fine thinker and good writer. I skimmed only about 15 pages: some writerly stuff. Otherwise first rate. He was a Socialist at heart but had no time for most of the left.

Orwell, like Kafka, is one of those writers for which one can imagine a section of the brain devoted to receiving their ideas. This is not a book that must be read from cover to cover, but may be explored at random. The essays that I appreciate the most are "Politics and the English Language", "Why I Write" and "A Hanging". Orwell's observation of politics, both left and right, is still relevant to this day. In my opinion, these essays should be required reading.

Orwell proves himself to be a smart man with keen insight on the world. Some of his observations seem downright prophetic in retrospect. However, he is not without his own biases and that shines through very clearly. And some of the things the collector of these messages chose to focus on were repetitive in nature. I think a more eclectic mix showing his strongest writing on just one topic a piece would be more fruitful over three different pieces of writing on British cuisine. Also would have been nice if the essays were clearly labelled with the year of publication.

Also a public service announcement, Oscar Wilde was Irish, not English.

Essays (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) by George Orwell (2002)

This is an enormous doorstop of a book, with over 1,300 pages of George Orwell’s essays. Of course that doesn’t cover everything he wrote, but it’s an awful lot. While best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell was probably a better essayist than a novelist. This volume contains Orwell’s best and most famous essays, printed many places (including online), like “Such, Such Were the Joys,” “Shooting an Elephant,” and “Politics and the English Language." It also includes other thought-provoking but harder to find essays like “A Hanging,” and “Notes on Nationalism,” as well as the excellent and still very relevant preface to the first edition of Animal Farm, “The Freedom of the Press.”

As you would expect, there’s plenty here of Orwell’s favorite topics, totalitarianism, fascism, communism, and imperialism, but also much about the little details of everyday life, from how to make the perfect cup of tea to his concept of an ideal pub. This collection has all 80 of the “As I Please” columns that Orwell wrote for the Tribune, a column that can be political but just as often addresses grammar and word choice, attacks clichéd writing, and bemoans the lack of technological advancement in activities such as washing dishes. Orwell wrote many book reviews as well, most of which serve more as a format for him to express his opinions than as a discussion of the books themselves. Sometimes these are on surprising but intriguing topics, such as Orwell's criticism of Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare. There are also some funny little gems, like a rant of a letter Orwell wrote in response to a questionnaire he was sent about the Spanish Civil War that begins, “Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish” and escalates from there.

This book is organized chronologically, which makes sense, but unfortunately suffers from the lack of an index. Still, for those who want to go beyond the same 10-15 essays that are printed in most anthologies, this edition will provide as many Orwell essays as just about anyone could possibly want to read.

Im not going to even pretend I read all 1300 plus pages, I skipped around to some of the more releavant essays. I just want to get it off my currently readings list, because in reality I probably never could read all the essays.

Essay on politics, culture, and literature. These are the ones I've read till now.

1. A Farthing Newspaper - 5 Stars
2. The Spike - 5 Stars
3. A Hanging -5 Stars
4. Clink - 4 Stars
5. Common Lodging Houses - 3 Stars
6. Shooting an Elephant - 5 Stars
7. Review of Tolstoy: His Life ad Work by Derrick Leon - 2 Stars
8. Are Books Too Dear? - 5 Stars
9. Review of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated by Constance Garnett - 2 Stars
10. Reflections on Gandhi - 4 Stars
11. Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool - 2 Stars
12. Review of The Sword and the Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand - 3 Stars
13. The Meaning of a Poem -5 Stars
14. Interview with George Orwell and Jonathan Swift - 5 Stars
15. Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels -5 Stars
16. Spilling the Spanish Beans -5 Stars
17. Unpublished Response to Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War -5 Stars
18. Politics and the English Language -5 Stars
19. Why I Write - 4.5 Stars
20. Notes on Nationalism - 5 Stars
21. How the poor die - 5 Stars
22. Inside the Whale - 4 Stars
23. Personal Notes on Scientifiction - 4 Stars
24. Tobias Smollett: Scotland's Best Novelist - 4 Stars
25. Nonsense Poetry: The Lear Omnibus edited by R.L. Megroz - 4.5 Stars
26. In Defense of the Novel - 4 Stars
27. In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse -4 Stars

A splendid doorstop (at 1369 pages), this Everyman edition of Orwell's essays has given me many hours of deep pleasure. The classics are worth revisiting: the disturbing "Shooting an Elephant" and "Marrakech;" the astringent "Politics and the English Language" (the moralist's version of Strunk and White's Elements of Style); the confused, almost plaintive "Why I Write." My favorite is Orwell's blistering mini-memoir "Such, Such Were the Joys," closely followed by "A Nice Cup of Tea," the authoritative guide to brewing.

"Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter." There you have Orwell, in a sip out of a saucer.

Years before, in fact, generations before neoliberalism reared its ugly head, George Orwell had the courage to say many politically undesirable things, and the one I found noteworthy was that planned economies are stronger than market economies. Orwell targeted the everyday aspect of ideology and charged it with the political weight on his desire to see a Socialist Democratic society come into being. I have found Orwell's political outlook highly instructive. What I have learned about Fascism in the last few books I have read, dating back to mid-April of this year, is that fascism stands for those on the side of unfairness, whereas socialism and Marxism (in its original and uncorrupted form), on the other hand, are on the side of fairness in terms of political customs and the legitimate recognition of human rights in a democratic way.

Orwell demonstrates in these essays a political belief-system that would eventually lend itself to creating the technical approach he would take in writing his two great political narrative works, 1984 and Animal Farm, which portray societies of profound masculinity through political technocracy. Although sometimes he repeats himself, he is far from meretricious in the rhapsodic, journalistic approach in these essays, which are lighter and more effective than the allegorical, and in some respects uni-dimensional, dystopian fiction he became famous for. I am reminded of a book I read earlier this year by E.J. Hobsbawm, who said that if you are more concerned with preserving the social order, you vote Conservative, but if you feel more strongly that Liberal Democracy is worth preserving, you vote accordingly. Be that as it may, most people believe that national and political loyalties are not as important as their understanding of social experience, which will be of critical importance for the development of international socialism.

I see George Orwell's politics as a pre-Marxist theoretical circle lying within the circumference of late 20th century politics. If he had lived into his sixties, say, instead of dying of tuberculosis at age fifty, it is possible he would have seen the fad for left-wing Anglo-American Marxist theories as an just another ideology of those monopolizers of cultural capital, who would use it to reinforce their class status over the powerless, the cultural reinforcement of the prevalence of the existing power-structure and, by extension, the legitimacy of the monopoly. I find that George Orwell has given me a considerable amount of food for thought, especially in regarding my endless bantering with Jeremy Good's as to why I, as an intellectual, consider politics and politicians so beneath me to the point that I do not wish to take part in political elections. Jeremy said that "You regard politics as beneath you because you think they are non-intellectual unless there is some intellectual, like Marx, to discuss them in an abstract way. I don’t compartmentalize my life like that. We live in an intellectual universe where there are real laws that can only be understood by trying to think about them. Not by pretending that they don’t exist and that our souls go to heaven when we die but maybe Marx was right because he was an 'intellectual'." The answer may be due in part to what Raymond Williams has to say about Boudieu's statement that although intellectuals attempt to "maximize the autonomy of the cultural field and raise the social value of the specific competencies of the involved, they simultaneously attempt to promote the scarcity of those competencies. This is the reason why, although intellectuals may mobilize wider concepts of political democracy or economic equality in their struggle against economic capital, they always resist as a body moves towards cultural democracy." While I don't think that's quite correct in my case, it is interesting in that it points to a possible psychodynamic situation in which I am in psychological agreement in some way by means of an apologetic proof.

In Orwell's post-WWII England, due to the relative inefficiency of cultural capital for reproduction, the dominant class was presented with a major problem. As a result of the increasing democratization of education due to reforminst pressures (and these pressure themselves were necessary in order to reinforce the legitimizing power of schooling as a mechanism for social reproduction) and the attendant raising of working class' educational expectations, who, sending the linkage between a better job associated with the attained education level, the political outcome was that the Labour party won a series of national elections. However, as history has shown, in both England and in America, these expectations are not being met and cannot be met in existing capitalistic society for the simple logic that in order to retain schooling as a hierarchization through which the dominance clas-structures retain their control and in order to build new center of economic power and thus extend the legitimation of their control-process, the dominant class is force to devalue educational qualifications, while at the same time the objective developments in the field of material production are yielding to massive de-skilling and proletarianization of traditional mental labor. This is Orwell's dystopian fantasy come true, a strategy of dominance and subjugation that is increasingly reliant on direct rather than symbolic violence. Orwell's lifelong opinion, and mine as well, is that a sustainable Democratic Socialism is required to break us out of this political quagmire.

According to Orwell, no class of societies is more bourgeois (in terms of morality) than the proletariat. And no group is more tied to their class-convictions regarding the primacy of property rights than the petit-bourgeois. Societies should not be a clubhouse for the rich based on a universalist neo-culture, Socialist Democracy society would combine freedom with the extreme morality needed for systemic purpose, not a clumsy participation by the general body of the public. In contrast to critiques of writers in terms of their various levels of the textual determination of meaning, I can only do overviews and approximations, not close readings, for which I am labelled as a "B"-level student.

Unlike much of the pro-Russian British populace, or ever those who saw no difference between communism and fascism, Orwell is quick to point the fallacy the notion of the so-called superiority of socialist realism, an argument that has been seemingly been taken out of modern debate by the elimination of such writing from the principle vendors of this perspective from its platform, authors such as Althusser, Malraux and Mikhail Sholokhov and other more minor figures. In Orwell's last essay, on the awarding of a prize to the poetry of Ezra Pound, he leaves us with an implicit prophecy that art cannot survive if it is based on a pure expression identical with the politics of the victor; therefore, it's not a surprise when he labels the prospects of literature as "outmoded." Three stars.

The edition that I have read is the Penguin compilation containing many of the essays for which Orwell is well known.

Orwell was one of the most perceptive and prescient writers of the twentieth century. Although he is well known for his satires, 1984 and Animal Farm, his journalism and other writing, such as the essays are well worth exploring.

Most of the work in the Penguin edition was written in the ‘30s and ‘40s. They contain literary criticism, politics of the day, and ruminations on everyday life.

Orwell could be a piercing critic and commentator on contemporary matters, particularly the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, but also write about the artists of seaside risqué postcards common in Britain. His observations range from writers such as Swift, but also the writing of boys and girls weeklies.

Hugely enjoyable and something to reread.

3 quarters of the book I was not interested in them, but even for one quarter it was worth the time. A pity we can't have his view of so many current issues today. (He would be cancelled, no doubt)

Essential writings of Orwell are more necessary today than ever before.