A total of 41 essays. Other reviews go into more detail. A Hanging, Shooting an Elephant, In Defence of P.G Wodehouse and Charles Dickens were some of my favourites. Orwell’s brilliant wit, satire, love of nature and insights into a variety of topics shine through in his writings. Sadly, the themes he writes about in the 1940s are still relevant today.

Selected essays. I thought the essays here on Dickens and Kipling were revelations. About ninety percent of the essays cited by other authors that I have read are included here. I also particularly liked "Inside the Whale," a paean to Henry Miller's masterpiece, Tropic of Cancer.

I'm back on my reading again and loved this collection of essays with an insight into a fascinating mind- although the racist comments from his time in India and Morocco are hard to swallow- all the essays still have a deeper sense of someone crying out to be heard.

A Collection of Essays by George Orwell

Of the forty essays here there are many that are remarkable. Orwell's honesty and humility are as notable as his razor shape insight.

I have always liked Orwell's non-fiction. I consider an Homage to Catalonia to be one of the best war memoirs ever written.

Here are the five-star essays that moved me the most.

1. A Hanging - a famous essay about a man's last minutes before his hanging. Orwell witnessed the event during his military service in Burma. Upon reading this vivid paragraph I immediately thought of an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. A Hanging begins: It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

2. Shooting an Elephant - perhaps the best short memoir that I have ever read. The courage that it takes to write such a humiliating story about oneself is remarkable and there are so many memorable lines like these. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

3. Marrakech - Orwell's insights about imperialism are so razor sharp here in this essay about his brief stay in Marrakech. Orwell never panders and he is clear eyed about the poverty. The thoughts that enter his white privileged mind are not without prejudice but they are always infused with some form of humanity. When you walk through a town like this — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in — when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon this fact.

4. Mark Twain the Licensed Jester- in this essay Orwell both praises Twain for his wit and skewers him for his hypocritical positions on capitalism. I found it interesting that Orwell spent much of the essay reviewing Life on the Mississippi and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The first was his best book and the latter his worst in my opinion. Several of Mark Twain’s books are bound to survive, because they contain invaluable social history. His life covered the great period of American expansion. When he was a child it was a normal day’s outing to go with a picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an Abolitionist, and when he died the aeroplane was ceasing to be a novelty. This period in America produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture of a Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains, would be much dimmer than it is.

5. How the Poor Die- While in Paris in the 20's, an impoverished Orwell was hospitalized for pneumonia. He was admitted to the public hospital and saw many patients who died during his time there and was appalled at the inhumane treatment that the patients, including himself, were subjected to. When I had got back my clothes and grown strong on my legs I fled from the Hôpital X, before my time was up and without waiting for a medical discharge. It was not the only hospital I have fled from, but its gloom and bareness, its sickly smell and, above all, something in its mental atmosphere stand out in my memory as exceptional. I had been taken there because it was the hospital belonging to my ARRONDISSEMENT, and I did not learn till after I was in it that it bore a bad reputation.

6. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad - with the arrival of spring, Orwell thinks of the animals and flowers that appear. A somewhat whimsical essay but it has a message about the natural world vs the man made world. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.

7. The Prevention of Literature - Orwell discusses how truth is central to good literature and that it is impossible to do so in totalitarian regimes and even difficult in democratic regimes like England where prejudices are very real. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

8. Why I Write - Orwell discusses his joy and motivation for writing. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

9. Such, Such Were the Joys - this is the bedwetter article. Despite the difficult topic, it is exceptionally well written and not a topic that most people would even address about themselves. Fright and shame seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.

5 stars easy for the whole collection.

If you ask me, essays are George Orwell's true talent. And I'm not just saying that because I think essays are da bomb or because I think Animal Farm is an overrated piece of caca. The thing that makes essays difficult to write is the ever-present "who cares?" question. All an essay really is is the musings of a man (or woman) written down. So, who cares? Why do I care what this guy thinks about whatever? Ahhh, but in the hands of a talented writer, who by their very nature must also be a talented and intriguing mind, an essay is like living in someone else's brain and heart if only for a few moments. So, it's no longer, "who cares?" but "How could you not want to live in these words and thoughts?" George Orwell is the latter kind of essayist. "Shooting an Elephant" is a classic and worth the read. But in this collection my personal favorite is "Why I Write." His description of narrating his own life in his mind could be taken straight from my own thoughts. Brilliant. Gorgeous. Love it.

George Orwell, acclaimed for his works of fiction such as Animal Farm and 1984, also left behind a rich legacy of essays that offer profound insights into politics, society, and human nature. Written during tumultuous times of political upheaval and social change, Orwell's essays reflect his keen intellect, unwavering commitment to truth, and unflinching criticism of authoritarianism.

Orwell's essays draw inspiration from a wide range of topics, including politics, literature, language, and everyday life. Many of his political essays are marked by their incisive analysis of power dynamics, propaganda, and the erosion of democratic values. Orwell's experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his disillusionment with Soviet communism heavily influenced his political writings, leading to seminal works such as Homage to Catalonia and Politics and the English Language- both excellent works.

Written against the backdrop of World War II and the rise of totalitarian regimes, Orwell's essays offer a trenchant critique of fascism, communism, and imperialism. His uncompromising stance against tyranny and oppression resonated with readers grappling with the moral complexities of the era. Additionally, Orwell's essays provide valuable historical context for understanding the social and political forces at play during his lifetime.

Orwell's essays are characterised by their clarity, precision, and lucid prose. His writing style is marked by a straightforward simplicity that belies the depth of his insights. Whether dissecting political rhetoric or reflecting on the nuances of everyday life, Orwell's essays are a testament to his mastery of the English language and his ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and eloquence.

For me, Orwell's political essays, including Shooting an Elephant, Politics and the English Language, and Notes on Nationalism, in particular, stand out as highlights of the collection, offering incisive commentary on the pressing issues of his time.

Orwell's political essays are characterised by their rigorous analysis, moral clarity, and unwavering commitment to truth. His ability to dissect propaganda and expose the mechanisms of power remains as relevant today as it was during Orwell's lifetime. Readers will find themselves engrossed in Orwell's astute observations and prophetic warnings about the dangers of totalitarianism and ideological fanaticism. An absolute legend.

The collection also includes essays of a more personal and idiosyncratic nature, such as A Nice Cup of Tea, and Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. I’ll be honest I just felt sad reading these, sometimes a guy needs to know when to stop writing every thought he has and just go to the pub and talk it out with some mates.

Despite the random, weird ones, Orwell's essays remain essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of the modern world, and I’d definitely recommend them to absolutely anyone.

Full of wisdom, humour, courage, and truth.

Contents of the edition I read (edited by Bernard Crick and published by Penguin Modern Classics):
1. Why I Write
2. The Spike
3. A Hanging
4. Shooting an Elephant
5. Bookshop Memories
6. Marrakech
7. n  Charles Dickensn
8. Boys' Weeklies
9. Inside the Whale
10. My Country Right or Left
11. The Lion and the Unicorn
12. Wells, Hitler and the World State
13. The Art of Donald McGill
14. n  Rudyard Kiplingn
15. Looking Back on the Spanish War
16. n  W.B. Yeatsn
17. Poetry and the Microphone
18. In Defense of English Cooking
19. Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí
20. Raffles and Miss Blandish
21. n  Arthur Koestlern
22. Antisemitism in Britain
23. In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse
24. Notes on Nationalism
25. Good Bad Books
26. The Sporting Spirit
27. Nonsense Poetry
28. The Prevention of Literature
29. Books v. Cigarettes
30. Decline of the English Murder
31. Politics and the English Language
32. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
33. A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray
34. Confessions of a Book Reviewer
35. Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels
36. How the Poor Die
37. Riding Down from Bangor
38. Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
39. Such, Such Were the Joys
40. Writers and Leviathan
41. Reflections on Gandhi

A very thoughtful collection of essays, a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Not all are worth of 5* but enough to merit that overall rating, in my view. I truly enjoyed:
The Spike
A Hanging
Shooting an Elephant
Marrakech
Inside the Whale (I feel the same way about Henry Miller... )
Wells, Hitler and the World State
Looking Back on the Spanish War
The Prevention of Literature
Sone Thought on the Common Toad
How the Poor Die
Lear, Tostoy and the Fool
Such, Such Were the Joys
Reflections on Ghandi

1984 was published in 1949. But in 1943, in "Looking Back on the Spanish War", Orwell writes of: "...a nightmare world in which the Leader... controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event 'It never happened' - well, it never happened. If he says that 'two and two are five ' well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs..."
In "The Prevention of Literature" (1946): "From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in fact 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 than imaginary triumph actually happened... Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objetive truth."
Lastly, on a different topic, when discussing Ghandi and portraying the goal of sainthood as anti-humanistic - in "Reflections on Ghandi": "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up in life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other individuals."
How amazing is that.

To understand the twentieth century, you have to read Orwell. This is quoted on the blurb, and I guess to an extent I would agree with it.

This collection of essays written by Orwell during the 19th century- probably thinking they are all outdated, but I can vouch they are very timely and relevant- are written with such detail.

This collection includes literary reviews, autobiographical pieces, column-pieces written for the media. If I could give a reading list to all politicians this would be at the top of my list. Orwell writes about politics and culture that is not bulky, it is easy to read and you can tell he was well-read and travelled himself through his writing, but also because of him writing about topics such as British imperialism, the criticism of liberals during the Spanish war and of course political debates about British society.

The compilations of a wide range of topics of literary essays/criticisms- I found his writing on Dickens really interesting… but also long. It took me some time to get through it, but I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a non-fiction read. Stunning and brilliant Orwell is a genius- one person who I wished I could have met. A collection I will be re-visiting

Neden Yazıyorum - Edebiyat Üzerine - Faşizm Kehanetleri toplu yorumudur. Valla bunlar çok güzel, Orwell’in eserlerindeki dünyanın arkasını anlamak isteyenler için birebir. “Edebiyat Üzerine”de yazarın ütopyalar ve distopyalara dair fikirleri, komünizm ve kapitalizme dair oldukça ilginç analizleri ve “sol edebiyat”la ilgili çok kafa açıcı analizleri var. “Faşizm Kehanetleri” yine ağırlıklı edebiyat eleştirilerinden oluşuyor, içindeki “Milliyetçilik Üzerine Görüşler”e bayıldım. “Neden Yazıyorum”, aslında daha önce okuduğum “Bir İdam” ile büyük ölçüde çakışıyordu, benzer bir derleme. Ama Orwell’in meşhur “Bir Fili Vurmak” öyküsü de bu kitapta. 7 sayfalık bir metin nasıl ciğerinizi sökebilir deneyimlemek isterseniz tavsiye ederim.

The only problem with this book is that it ends in 1949. I’d love to know what George Orwell would have thought of the world we live in now.

There were quite a few essays in this collection (I did skip a couple) which, on the face of them, seemed uninteresting or irrelevant to the modern reader but turned out to be quite illuminating in their own way. I never would have read a thirty-page critical appraisal of Dickens, for example, unless it was sandwiched between stuff like Shooting an Elephant and The Lion and the Unicorn. But Orwell's commentary on Dickens, Thirties boys' weekly magazines, Arthur Koestler, the Raffles novels, and P.G. Wodehouse—stuff I don't intend to read and would probably rather pick up Fifty Shades if forced to choose between them on a long-haul flight—is often very very entertaining.

Even the duller critical pieces are really interesting as glimpses into the political landscape of the time: the chronological ordering in this volume takes us from the early Thirties right through WWII to its aftermath. We get a firsthand perspective on the history and politics nobody talks about any more: the people from all the British political factions who supported Fascism, for example, right up until Dunkirk. It's so interesting to see Orwell speculating about the outcome of the war, just as interesting as it is to compare his famous totalitarian predictions with what actually happened in 1984.

When I read Homage to Catalonia, the only other Orwell under my belt, I was struck most of all by Eric Blair's sense of fairness: his ability to recognise, in the midst of trench warfare, that the men on the opposing side were much the same as him: they either believed in what they were fighting for, or had ended up there by sheer bad luck—and in either case, if one of them shot Orwell, he had this 'Fair play, old chap' attitude. People who were willing to fight and die for their beliefs had his respect, no matter what their political stripe. Similarly, in these essays he never (or very rarely) attacks someone's politics or writing from an ethical standpoint; instead, he focuses on hypocrisy; he analyses why someone writes or thinks the way they do, and then points out the logical flaws and contradictions in that worldview.

Some of my favourites, with a few choice quotes:

> In Why I Write, Orwell explains that he never had any particular desire to be a political writer: it was a matter of necessity. As a writer, he had to say something about the frightening times in which he lived. I feel the same way about climate change—in a perfect world, no way in hell would I be writing about the apocalypse, but somebody has to, even if nobody reads it.

> The 50-page behemoth The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, written on the eve of war, is really interesting, and despite being spot on in a lot of its analysis (about the changing-and-yet-unchanging character of England, about WWII as a crucible for change), it's also quite heartbreaking.

‘Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out ... when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England i was taught to love so long ago and for such different reasons is somehow persisting.'

Such wishful thinking, Eric! Although he was definitely right about the first part. We had our chance, we came painfully close to revelation, if not a revolution, with the Attlee government and the creation of the welfare state, and we blew it. Damn us all to hell, we blew it up!! Spot on, too, about the peculiarly nebulous identity of England, always morphing but never changing its essential 'whatness'. I relate a lot to Orwell's love-hate relationship with this country.

> From Arthur Koestler:

There is nothing for it except to be a “short-term pessimist”, i.e. to keep out of politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can remain sane, and hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred years.

Yup, sounds about right in 2021.

> Ditto: ‘All revolutions are failures, but they are not the same failure.’

> From Antisemitism in Britain:

Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea-urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income.

> Three gems from Politics and the English Language:

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.

A mass of Latin words fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity ... when the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer ... every such phrase [cliches and obscuring language] anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.

Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his gift may suffer.

> Some Thoughts on the Common Toad might be just about one of my favourite things ever written!

There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four mile radius [central London], and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

How many times have I watched the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could.

(This line is even more hilarious with the context: Orwell wrote the essay after another lovely piece about nature, A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray, provoked hundreds of letters from angry leftists telling him off for being 'bourgeois' enough to care about 'irrelevancies' like the natural world. The atmosphere of Twitter has always been with us, it seems, or at least since the Forties.)

> Benefit of Clergy: Notes on Salvador Dalí deals with a familiar dilemma: what do you do when an artist you admire turns out to be a shitty person? I had no idea what a disgusting sociopath Dalí was; I sort of imagined him as a Thirties sort of 'omg i'm so random xd' situation, the sort of person who walks an anteater down a city street just to freak people out——let the poor creature go, you fucking wanker—but some of the anecdotes from his autobiography(!!), which Orwell was reviewing here, are genuinely sickening. Anyway, our Eric contends that when a terrible human being produces great art, people get too distracted by one quality or the other, and are unable to see both at once.

> I know the first one in particular is a little bit exaggerated, but Such, Such Were the Joys and How the Poor Die were haunting, horrifying, and read like very good short stories. Damn I feel bad for young Orwell.

> Books v Cigarettes is a superb little piece, although I was gobsmacked when Orwell said he smoked six ounces of tobacco a week! Six fucking ounces! That's almost a 30g baccy-pouch a day. The only time he wasn't smoking was when he was asleep, and even then he probably had one drooping out of his gob. And this from a man who had chronic bronchitis and emphysema from a very young age. Good lord.

> I was a little bit disappointed that n  The Moon Under Watern, an ode to the unattainable Perfect Boozer and one of my favourite short pieces of writing ever, wasn't included in this collection, but it's online so I read it alongside.

> Finally, Bernard Crick's introduction is a pretty interesting essay in itself. I read it at the end as a bit of extra commentary and I'm glad. One of the things Crick talks about a lot is Orwell's preoccupation with 'plain style', specifically his claim that it is impossible to deceive yourself or others in plain English. And yet, as Crick points out, Orwell used his trademark prose style to build a certain rhetorical character: salt-of-the-earth conversationalist George Orwell, as distinct from the shabby, posh, awkward Eric Blair. Not to mention the fact that the fascists nowadays tend to use as plain a vocab as possible, in order to hide the flimsiness of their working-class affectations.

Anyway, Down and Out in Paris and London is definitely next on my Orwell list.