I had known of George Orwell only through his books Animal Farm and 1984. I discovered his book Down and Out in Paris and London during a public library search for Animal Farm. That book in turn made me seek out and buy this complete collection of his essays. George Orwell was a man who read often, thought deeply, and wrote plainly about books, politics, and everyday things. Much of what he wrote and believed still has value today. He was a Socialist in that he believed that "it was right to eliminate poverty and to distribute resources evenly", as John Carey writes in his Introduction. He believed in "the decency of the common man" and had "faith in that decency prevailing."

I loved reading these essays. They are entertaining and informative. I learned much that I hadn't known before. I am sorry to have ended the book. George Orwell was only 47 when he died in 1949. I would have loved to have been able to read his thoughts on the Cuban Missile crisis, the Vietnam War, the space race to the moon, and, most especially, the slow demise of the USSR and the rise of Muslim terrorists. He left this world way too soon, and there is no other voice quite like his today.

the best.

I received this weighty book as a Christmas present, and made it my 2015 reading goal to complete it by the end of the year. Thanks to Orwell's brilliant essays, his surprisingly readable prose, and to my persistence, I finished four months early.

Most readers know Orwell for Animal Farm and 1984, and perhaps for his most famous essay, "Politics and the English Language." I was in that group, but I wanted to know more, so I dug in deeper. And this book is about as comprehensive as it gets. It is quite impossible to summarize all the ideas present in this massive volume. In short, here are Orwell's major themes:

Imperialism. Having been a part of an imperialist force but who hated himself for it, Orwell offers a unique insiders/outsiders perspective on British colonialism. He hates imperialism but is brutally realistic about the chances of liberated colonies to self-rule.

Nationalism. Writing in the time of the rise of Fascism and Communism, Orwell watched world leaders drum the support of their people into a frenzy and send them to their deaths. But he does not wholeheartedly reject nationalism, either, for he had no tolerance for flowery pacifist utopias. He saw what pacifism did to stop the Nazis-- nothing.

Language. Orwell avoided and advocated against ornate and flowery language. This is clear in his very straightforward, readable prose. But he warns against the dangers of euphemism and jargon. His essay "Politics and the English Language" is probably the purest distillation of this idea, but numerous essays in the volume develop it.

Literary Criticism. Orwell is sometimes overlooked as a literary critic. This volume offers a great number of critiques and reviews. The most useful, in my opinion, were his explorations of Dickens, Swift, Joyce, Gissing, and Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare (really, a criticism of a critique).

This is a comprehensive volume. There are also a number of shorter pieces he wrote for The Tribune that are more varied and fanciful in nature-- he reflects on how to make a good cup of tea, reflects on current events or things he missed from his childhood, and other trivialities. This pieces, I felt, lightened the tone of the volume and made it more enjoyable to read.

I'm sure there are plenty of "greatest essays of Orwell" collections out there if you want the highlights. But one of the chief pleasures of undertaking this project was that I was able to observe Orwell's ideas and interests evolve over time. I could not help underlining and taking notes throughout on concepts that later appear in Animal Farm and 1984. These two novels, written toward the end of his short life, were fictional enactments of concerns that were nascent in his writing a decade earlier. If you just read those two novels, you are looking at the edifice of an impressive building. If you read this collection of essays, you are seeing the very frame of the house, down to every last joint and joist. It took time for me to get through these 1300 pages. But it has left an indelible mark on me as a reader, as a writer, and as a citizen of the 21st century.

Essays collects most if not all of Orwell’s non-fiction essays from over two decades of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and other printed material. Eqch piece provides insights into the mind of Orwell and his thoughts and perceptions of the world during the 1930s and 1940s. Book reviews bring out the analytical English teacher, sometimes mingling author comparisons to peers with political analysis. His political pieces range from his stances on democratic socialism, anti-authoritarian advocacy, and nuanced criticisms of the media and intelligencia, progressive, liberal, and conservative. Opinion pieces reveal his views on life during and after wartime. Ramblings on the English language, while appearing to be the ranting of a preservationist, touch on the point of manipulating words to sound smarter or disguise your true intentions.

More importantly, this book is a record of his life and the real world sources for many of the themes—totalitarianism, super states, newspeak, doublethink, propaganda—and imagery—doodlebugs/V1s, wartime Britain, rations, the junk shop—that ultimately culminated in 1984.

Indispensable and important to me in a beyond-words kind of way. I read every single essay in this sucker -- with joy in my heart, I might add -- and am so glad I didn't just pick my way through the appealing-sounding ones, but for you picker-throughers (i.e. non-insane people), here are the best offerings from the best writer of non-fiction of ever, nothing less than a unintentional primer on how to write, think, and act like a human being. You're welcome, and Happy New Year!

A Hanging
Shooting an Elephant
Bookshop Memories
In Defense of the Novel
Charles Dickens
Boys' Weeklies
Inside the Whale
New Words
My Country Right or Left
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius
Tolstoy and Shakespeare
The Meaning of a Poem
Literature and Totalitarianism
No, Not One
Benefit of the Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
As I Please 36, 55, 58
In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse
Anti-Semitism in Britain
Revenge is Sour
The Prevention of Literature
Politics and the English Language
A Nice Cup of Tea
Bad Climates are Best
The Moon Under Water
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray
Why I Write
Such, Such Were the Joys
Reflections on Gandhi

A brilliant set of essays, providing great insights into Orwell's world -- the end of colonialism, the rise of fascism and Stalinism, the evolution of British society. I read Orwell's essays in college (in fact, I may have read some in high school), and have usually carried a volume around with me since. Orwell has been one of the most influential people in the shaping of my own world view.

So many great essays -- in "Politics and the English Language," Orwell talks about why so many political tracts are badly written -- because people actually want to conceal what they are trying to say (advocating violence sounds so much better when dressed up in patriotic cliches). In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell discusses one particular day when he was on the police force in Burma, and what the events of that day taught him about the nature of imperialism. In "Reflections on Gandhi," Orwell described why he disliked the man. When first I read the essay I was shocked -- how could ANYONE dislike Gandhi? But Orwell says that Gandhi was trying to be a saint, and that saints are different in nature from other people. To be a saint, you must love everyone equally. But to be human means to love some people -- your family, your friends -- more than others. Orwell sees that as the more worthwhile goal.

Plus essays on Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Tolstoy's take on King Lear, boy's stories, dirty postcards (Orwell loves reading and analyzing everything), his own school days, the Spanish civil war, etc. All written in clear, accessible prose.

Priceless exemplifications of the modern essay. Orwell on writing, on patriotism, on the power of mystery stories and much else is still wise and thoroughly relevant. Above all else, he holds up vivid expression and always non-sentimental observation. The polar opposite of bloviating, noisemaking talking heads and pundits today. For writers and aspiring writers, essential reading and re-reading . . .

I'm not qualified to review a writer of this stature and complexity really. But it fleshed out my sense of the man. He was raised in horrific circumstances, terribly abused psychologically by stupid, repressed 19th century teachers, but his brilliance served him well and he came into his own. As the politically astute intellectual he was, he criticizes Dickens' obliviousness to the hardened economic structures of England, and Dickens' sense that oppression was at root a moral issue that could be corrected by appeal to our "better spirits." The Spanish War awakened him to his sense of country and patriotism, something the Left could be more assertive about in modern America. But Orwell was talking about racism and communism set in Germany and Russia. Still, think how 1984 finally, accurately predicts the Internet's threatened destruction of reality, if by technological means unsuspected in 1948.

The Essays is a bit of a slog when, as an accomplished literary critic, Orwell is taking to task failures in literary technique and attacking writers you may not have heard of, but there are valuable nuggets along the way that make it worth it. Probing critical comments on Tolstoy and Arthur Koestler and Kipling, though. He loves Henry Miller and detests Salvador Dali.

Check it out.

lots of orwell's thoughts on various matters, from the perfect cup of tea to the necessity of socialism. wonderful essay on updating written english, with an example of vegetable being spelled vejtbl, which seems far more accurate to what is generally spoken. an introduction to a translated version of animal farm is also of note, and a long piece about his time in schooling institutions.

This is essential reading for the George Orwell fan. If you wish to read all of it, however, you will have to be disciplined! It took me close to a year and a half of off and on reading to finish the book. I argue that the time was well worth it.
Some of Orwell's best writing seem to be his essays. Time and time again he displays his adept analysis and his willingness to communicate difficult messages. This collection was SO relevant to me (a reader in 2016) and yet it's messages were written seven decades ago. Orwell refused to accept easy conclusions. In his essays he delves into difficult questions, defies conventions, and challenges those he would consider his allies.
The collection is also very multi-faceted. He, at different times in his essays: talks about how to brew a perfect cup of tea, often contemplates the "inevitable" Third World War and it's atomic bombs, constantly challenges "leftists" and "liberals" & is downright opposed to the so-called "Communism" of the USSR. He is a defender of the odd and outcast, and he is steadfastly opposed to totalitarianism.
I highly recommend this book for any Orwell nerd like me. You will see traces all over the place of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "Animal Farm" and "Homage to Catalonia". For example, Orwell spends more than a few essays contemplating the possibility of a world dominated by three major powers (sound familiar?). There is even an introduction to a Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm which is very insightful. Although, this is the perfect book for the Orwell enthusiast. I also recommend it to any reader. Orwell's insatiable fascination with: politics, humanism, aesthetics, and literature to name a few can be enjoyed by just about anyone. I hesitate to use the word "timeless" because George Orwell would almost certainly object to it. But it's about as close as it gets.

You have to really like Orwell's non-fiction because this is ajust a collection of his writing for newspapers, etc. I think Orwell is probably one of the most influential writers of all time, even if just for 1984 which I think has changed the world to some degree.

Highly recommended, I only wish I could write this clearly, or even think this clearly. A lot about politics, propaganda and modern life (both haven't really changed since then it seems), the most impressive thing to me is that even though he nowadays counts as a socialist, he can impartially describe the follies of both left and right without falling for the lies and (self-)deceptions of either side. I don't know any "modern" (as in, currently alive) writers who can do this.

As a sidenote, one can find many "famous" formulations of Animal Farm or 1984 in these essays before they appeared in the books.

If you read one essay of his, choose this one: Politics and the English Language, probably the most relevant to contemporary times.

I've underlined about a hundred insightful passages which I'm just going to paste here so that you can get a general idea. All others can stop here.


(Keep in mind that most of these essays are written 1938-1949)

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form.


But that antisemitism will be definitively CURED, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.

In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened.

PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf

There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.

But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini’s corpse

At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

But suppose — and really this the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

Every writer, in any case, is rather that kind of person, but the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash — though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment — but constantly INVENTING reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.

People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? “Natural” death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.

This business of people just dying like animals, for instance, with nobody standing by, nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning — this happened more than once.

Machiavelli and his followers taught that in politics decency simply does not exist, and, by doing so, Burnham claims, made it possible to conduct political affairs more intelligently and less oppressively. A ruling class which recognised that its real aim was to stay in power would also recognise that it would be more likely to succeed if it served the common good, and might avoid stiffening into a hereditary aristocracy.

Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the USSR, has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger.

Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on wish-thinking, but they can have symptomatic value, especially when they change abruptly.

Such a world-picture fits in with the American tendency to admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes justification, and it fits in with the all-prevailing anti-British

Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn’t coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word “Socialism” a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one.

If I had to make a prophecy, I should say that a continuation of the Russian policies of the last fifteen years — and internal and external policy, of course, are merely two facets of the same thing — can only lead to a war conducted with atomic bombs, which will make Hitler’s invasion look like a tea-party. But at any rate, the Russian régime will either democratise itself, or it will perish. The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.

The question only arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness.

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like PHENOMENON, ELEMENT, INDIVIDUAL (as noun), OBJECTIVE, CATEGORICAL, EFFECTIVE, VIRTUAL, BASIS, PRIMARY, PROMOTE, CONSTITUTE, EXHIBIT, EXPLOIT, UTILIZE, ELIMINATE, LIQUIDATE, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.


MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. * Words like ROMANTIC, PLASTIC, VALUES, HUMAN, DEAD, SENTIMENTAL, NATURAL, VITALITY, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion

In the case of a word like DEMOCRACY, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — BESTIAL ATROCITIES, IRON HEEL, BLOODSTAINED TYRANNY, FREE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, STAND SHOULDER TO SHOULDER— one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called PACIFICATION.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of dictatorship.

He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted “police State”, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralize popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria.


If one is capable of intellectual detachment, one can PERCEIVE merit in a writer whom one deeply disagrees with, but ENJOYMENT is a different matter. Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself — not independently of the observer, indeed, but independently of the mood of the observer. In one sense, therefore, it cannot be true that a poem is good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. But if one judges the poem by the appreciation it arouses, then it can certainly be true, because appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be commanded.


In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about “petty-bourgeois individualism”, “the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism”, etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as “romantic” and “sentimental”, which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue.

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures.

There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone’s consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end. Literature has sometimes

Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: “Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer.” They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it”, and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it”.

To accept an orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions. Take for instance the fact that all sensitive people are revolted by industrialism and its products, and yet are aware that the conquest of poverty and the emancipation of the working class demand not less industrialisation, but more and more. Or take the fact that certain jobs are absolutely necessary and yet are never done except under some kind of coercion. Or take the fact that it is impossible to have a positive foreign policy without having powerful armed forces. One could multiply examples. In every such case there is a conclusion which is perfectly plain but which can only be drawn if one is privately disloyal to the official ideology. The normal response is to push the question, unanswered, into a corner of one’s mind, and then continue repeating contradictory catchwords. One does not have to search far through the reviews and magazines to discover the effects of this kind of thinking.

To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the régime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?