I found this book when I was researching titles on Fascism. It was a personal quest for more understanding of the current scenario, both in my country and in the world, in which we see the strengthening of backward ideas that have several times taken the world to war. This book, in particular, was a choice provoked by the reading of the author's book Animal Farm, which planted the seed of doubt in my head.
Of course, I studied Fascism and other forms of socio-political domination and control throughout my academic training. However, with the resumption of authoritarian governments, clothed in the legality of the vote, it caused much astonishment in much of the world where Fascism and Populism had already been extirpated (or at least it was thought so) as a form of blind convincing of the masses.
This book brought together various texts, reports, and essays by George Orwell when he went through a disillusionment phase with Communism. Celebrated for books such as the dystopias 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell was also a prolific reporter and columnist. In this book, readers will have the opportunity to read some of his non-literary texts - which may frustrate discerning readers. In many cases, there is no connection between the texts dealing with a particular era and phase of the writer—a good book within the proposal.

If George Orwell had died just a few years earlier, his biggest claims to fame, Animal Farm and 1984, would never have been written. In this parallel universe, he would have been remembered (if at all) for his non-fiction.

Orwell wrote a number of earlier novels, but none of them has ever set the world alight. However, many readers have thrilled to the scintillating prose of his extended non-fiction works – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia and of course his essays.

As a non-fiction writer, Orwell had a remarkable style of his own. His prosaic no-nonsense manner of writing, often brusque and sweeping, seems almost without style at first, yet this is misleading.

In fact, Orwell set much stock on style, and we can see this in his essay on How I Write (included at the beginning of this volume), where he discusses how all writers have a certain style or use of particular defining phrases. One surprise in this volume is to see Orwell, one of the least poetic of writers, attempting a few poems.

This particular collection covers more than Orwell’s essays, and some of the content will probably only appeal to George Orwell buffs. Luckily, people who enjoy Orwell’s non-fiction often are buffs, since his works almost act as an autobiography of their author. We can use these books to follow Orwell’s progress throughout this period of his life

With this collection of letters and reviews spanning from 1920 to 1940, we can follow Orwell’s story first-hand as it unfolds. It can be a fascinating journey too. Thrill as he lets drop the moment where he has chosen the name, George Orwell. Watch his progress towards socialism as he explores the lives of homeless and working people. See his increased politicisation via the Spanish Civil War.

Of course, the volume is not always ideal for those who engage in hero worship towards Orwell. The writings reveal a man who is frequently very ordinary and mundane in his life and observations. He also shared some of the prejudices of his age, anti-feminist and sometimes faintly racist, e.g. towards the Japanese. I suspect (reading between the lines) that he is possibly a little homophobic too.

These attitudes were in fact very common in Britain all the way until the end of the 1970s and Orwell is certainly no worse than many people of the age. He did at least have progressive socialist views, and the ability to identify with many of the nations trapped by British imperialism.

He did remain something of a patriot however, and the final essay, My Country Right or Left provides an astonishing volte-face as we watch Orwell move from opposition to any war that puts him on the side of the capitalists to a final grudging support of the British government’s war effort due to his love of his country.

While the letters and reviews are not without interest, the undoubted highlight of this first volume is the essays, though we have to read a long time before we finally reach them. Along the journey are The Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, in which Orwell takes grim and rather sad events from his life in Burma and uses them to draw a moral about the corrupt nature of imperialism, a system in which the rulers are just as trapped as the subjugated nations.

At the end of the volume, there are a number of the essays that made up Orwell’s first book of essays, Inside the Whale. Many of these are sociological analyses of written works. However, whilst Orwell writes as a socialist, and points to the political content of these writings, he is no pretentious and impenetrable Marxist literary critic.

In fact, his writing shows his real love of literature, something we glancingly view in the many reviews found throughout this volume. Orwell was not in any doubts about the limits of modern literature. In his essay, In Defence of the English Novel, written a few years earlier, he deplores the factors that he fears are reducing the novel to a place of low repute.

While the novel has not died out, Orwell’s analysis offers a few penetrating insights, especially when he turns his gaze on literary reviews and why they often fail the reader. As Orwell points out, the reviewer faces two main problems.

Firstly, hostile reviews risk losing advertising space, leading to partial reviews. Secondly, since most novels are ‘tripe’ (to use Orwell’s favourite word), the honest critic could not say this about every novel s/he looks at, or the review would become a nonsense. The critic is therefore forced to over-rate many works that s/he knows to be tripe by comparing them favourably with even worse tripe.

Elsewhere Orwell turns his attention to another form of bad writing, the Boy’s Weeklies. He makes a number of interesting points about the changing focus of the weeklies over the years, and how they are still united by their uniform attitude towards romanticising the ruling class and keeping the lower classes in their place.

I am not certain how far this is a conscious and deliberate decision by the publishers, as Orwell suggests. I suspect it is more of a filter whereby the publishers will set aside stories that do not fit their worldview, but without seeking to mould their viewers’ minds in a conspiratorial manner.

Rather amusingly, the editors of this volume include a riposte written by Peter Richards (author of Billy Bunter), in which he attacks the accuracy of Orwell’s analysis of his (and other) stories in the Boy’s Weeklies. However, his attack actually serves only to confirm some of Orwell’s original assertions, as Richards comes across as silly, narrow-minded and parochial in his opinions.

Perhaps the finest essay here is Orwell’s analysis of Charles Dickens. We may well dispute some of Orwell’s sweeping statements, but there are some well-made arguments about Dickens here. While Orwell is frequently rude and dismissive about Dickens, the essay is ultimately respectful and its detailed knowledge of Dickens’ novels betrays Orwell’s deep and enduring love of the subject matter.

Inside the Whale is a more general analysis of literature of the age, and the political preoccupations of the writers. Orwell’s starting point is Henry Miller, a writer who has fascinated him (as evidenced in earlier letters).

Orwell is both impressed and appalled by the selfish laisser-faire attitude of Miller towards the appalling political storm that is brewing, yet still somehow prefers Miller to the communist writers of the 1930s who are standing up for something, but with a suspicious uniformity of thinking, and not much understanding of the brutal realities of what they wish to fight for.

In spite of its title, this is not actually a definitive collection of Orwell’s personal and public writings, and the editors make it plain that they have been selective in their choices, and even removed repetitive passages from some of those choices.

This is no bad thing, as there is no particular need to read every word that Orwell wrote, even if one is an admirer. As it stands, the first volume provides a valuable and rich source of information about one of the important literary figures of the early twentieth-century.

Often as I get older I think of my inevitable end and my possessions being shoveled into the trash, wondering whether anyone will stop to ponder what this sliver of dry wood meant, or that old, well-worn shirt, or the little pile of Roman coins. And my books, my thousands of books. Some might get taken to a used bookstore, but my copy of An Age Like This will go straight into the bin.

It's an old friend that has been with me for decades, a British Penguin paperback bought in a used bookstore - almost certainly the Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor, when a visit meant prowling the steam tunnels under the street going through the stacks, hearing the skateboards rattle over the sidewalk expansion joints above. $3.50 I paid for it, according to the handwritten price on the first page. How much pleasure for such a small price, found between the now tattered orange covers. It's travelled with me to Australia and back. I so often turn to it, and someone will toss it.

This is the first volume of the original four volumes of collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell, and what a marvelous collection it is. Part of its importance to anyone interested in Orwell is the presence of material that illuminates Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia; we also see Orwell brilliantly coming into his powers as the finest essayist in the English language of the 20th Century. There is a lot to enjoy in here; his essays on Dickens, Boy's Weeklies, and Henry Miller ("Inside the Whale"), his pieces "Shooting an Elephant" and "Marrakech," his "Road to Wigan Pier diary," and so much more. Even his letters and book reviews have plenty of interest even now (one of the more amusing letters being Orwell explaining to his publisher Victor Gollancz that he cannot at the moment lend him his copy of Tropic of Cancer because the police have been by to confiscate it).

Possibly I'm prejudiced because this book has been with me for over 35 years through thick and thin, but it's wonderful reading.

Nom nom nom. The personal Orwell shining through. Here he learns of a friend who began reading Ulysses, and replies at length expressing his enthusiasm and his opinion. Orwell on Joyce’s Ulysses, written when working as a school teacher in Suffolk, 10/12/1933.

‘As to the characters themselves,I think both Dedalus and Bloom are certainly self portraits—one of Joyce at 22 and the other at 38. I think Bloom is much the more interesting as well as the more successful. Dedalus is the ordinary modern intellectual whose mind is poisoned by his inability to believe in anything, and only different from the English version of the same thing by having been brought up in a Catholic atmosphere and on monkish learning instead of the classical education you get or are supposed to get in England. Bloom on the other hand is a rather exceptionally sensitive specimen of the man in the street, and I think the especial interest of this is that the cultivated man and the man in the street so rarely meet in modern English literature.’

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there hes 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efiace one's own personahty. Good prose is like a window pane. 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.!

The first volume of this collection of George Orwell’s essays, diaries, and letters covers the period from 1920-1940. During this time, Orwell published seven of his nine books and began to develop the political opinions that would later become so important in his work, but he was still relatively unknown.

In his letters, he did not mince words about some things he really, really disliked. These included:

Roman Catholics
feminists
Scottish people
vegetarians
fruit-juice drinkers
Oswald Mosley

On the other hand, he generally felt positively about the following:

Ulysses
women
cigarettes
Tropic of Cancer
Revolución!
goats

This collection was edited by Orwell’s widow, Sonia, and Ian Angus. His widow reportedly obstructed many of those who wanted to write his biography. She felt that his work, which was often autobiographical, should stand for itself. She wanted this collection to “read like a novel.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the selection of letters and essays is good, and going back and forth between them does work fairly well. They did cut all the racy parts out of the letters, presumably to avoid embarrassing people involved who may have still been living in 1968 when this was first published.

This is Volume One of a four-volume set edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. The set is called THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL.
This whole set came out in 1968. Sonia Orwell was Orwell's widow, so, to some extent, this is an authorized collection, but it is comprehensive.
It's clear Orwell wrote letters in the hope that someday the public would read them. There is a vast universe of Orwell beyond ANIMAL FARM and 1984. People who say his novels are not great as novels may find themselves amazed at the magnetic quality of his essays.
When I have a look at the index of any of the volumes in this collection and find a name, title or place I'm interested in, I check the page to which I am referred and invariably find I am learning something about politics, literature or history. Above all, I get a sense of Britain's culture. This is not the BBC version of British history (although Orwell certainly worked for the BBC during the Second World War. He modelled much of the evil bureaucracy described in 1984 on the benign bureaucracy for which he worked.)
The selections in this set make me think Orwell is sitting across from me. He often uses "I" and "you." (One of his last essays, in fact, is called "The Bomb and You.") Whether you picture him standing in a library, his cottage or a bread line, somehow he is always pointing at you. In any other writer this would be accusatory. But in Orwell it's a way of buttonholing you.
It is an ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three...

The best writing I've ever read.

I'm torn about what rating to give it, because while the first 3/4 of the book was interesting to me, it wasn't really good, whereas in the last few long essays he clearly found a form which really, really suited him. In the end I decided on four stars, both because I got a lot of pleasure from his early book reviews and letters and diary entries, and because seeing Orwell's sense of social justice growing and the intellectual work he did to refine it is just fascinating.

Orwell is fascinating.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

Circumstances colluded yesterday for me to read almost all of this compendium. I joined the ranks of countless undergrads by finally reading "A Hanging". Noteworthy are reviews which address Melville and Stendhal; even greater is the essay on Dickens. There are also fascinating letters to Runciman and Spender. A transformation from aspiring left leaning professional writer to Socialist but Anti-Communist journalist is depicted without undue commentary. Unfortunately for myself there is also a cluster of laborious didactic pieces on the situation in Spain during its Civil War. This is resolved as Orwell heads home after Spain only to discover that he's tubercular and he and his wife then consequently winter in Morocco. He's still there during the Munich appeasement and the conversion to political animal becomes complete. It is strange how the seminal essay Inside The Whale was always familiar by title to me personally but alas not by argument. That was certainly a joy to engage.

For the Orwell-phile.

A great supplement to his novels. This covers all of his earliest writings as well as background writings for "Wigan Pier" and "Down and Out". Some of the short pieces are quite excellent, on a par with Orwell at his best, especially the works on social degradation in England: "Hop-Picking", "The Spike", "Clink" (the latter sees Orwell getting very drunk and trying to get arrested). "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant" are here, too. "Bookshop Memories" also. Plenty of articles and correspondence on his experience in Spain during the Civil War. His poems included here are awful, funnily, and some of the letters are banal and trite, but most of the book reviews Orwell wrote during this period are interesting and inspirational.