Orwell has to be the best essayist of all times. My favorite are his literary critiques, which are the most interesting for the cultural and political analysis he brings to them. Orwell is a smart radical, far outside of the dogma of the left at a time when people like him (and there seemed to be few in the 1940s) were castigated from all sides.

This is the sort of book I may never read in its entirety, but that is in no way a knock against its quality. It is after all a tome, in the best sense of the word, and not a singular work. Orwell is the kind of writer that could and did find something interesting to say about just about any subject, though best known for his writing on politics and language he wrote about just about every culturally relevant topic under the sun during his heyday. Already I've read several essays covering everything Anglo American relations during World War 2, to art criticism, to american crime novels. You may not always agree with Orwell, but whether you do or not its hard to call any of his criticism poorly thought out. Highly recommend to anyone that is curious about Orwell or even the political and cultural climate of the 1930s.

This virtually comprehensive collection of Orwell's essays is one of my most treasured possessions, and revisiting it has been a major highlight of the last few months.

Orwell is perceptive, erudite, and well read but he is not a Great Thinker. He has no major system to propose; no original, transcendent ideas; and no rigorous quantitative analysis. His humble literary project, the ambition "to make political writing into an art," is useful for the transparent and honest access he grants the reader to his thought process, and the connections explored between day-to-day experience and higher political thought. Or, as Orwell himself puts it, his "facility with words and … power of facing unpleasant facts."

This lower-order, common sense approach to intellectual matters yields sharp, practical insights and exposes blind spots inherent in the systematic world views favored by intellectuals and the attendant brain rot of full-blown ideological thinking. The most obvious examples of this are his essays on political writing, like "Politics and the English Language" and "Propaganda and Demotic Speech," where he employs literary analysis to demonstrate the automatic, disconnected thought patterns produced by the mind virus of ideology.

The quotidian essays on personal experiences and English life, such as "A Nice Cup of Tea," "Bookshop Memories (hilariously accurate if you've ever worked in a book store)," and "Such, Such were the Joys" are a delight on their own, but when this sharply anthropological tendency is merged with political analysis you get some of his greatest essays like "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius." Read that and tell me it isn't one of the most enduring and accurate descriptions of the left. It pretty much sums up the Corbyn campaign.

The literary criticism, the ephemera produced for a couple pounds for some second-rate newspaper, the random musings and stories—it's all worth reading. And, by the way, in terms of literary criticism put another point up for Orwell against the intellectuals, as his massive volume of book reviews are more worthwhile than anything out of academia.