This is the fourth and, alas, the final volume of Orwell's collected non-fiction writing, covering the end of 1945 after the conclusion of the war until Orwell's death in January of 1950 (although the final letter printed here dates from October of 1949). Orwell died of tuberculosis after being plagued much of his adult life with intermittant poor health and spending most of his last two years in sanatoriums.

These 4 volumes have been keeping me company for 5 months now. Literary critique, history and politics and personal memoir all gifted to you in the best examples of lucid prose you will find. I was sorry to read the last page, knowing there would be no more. I will miss you George.

This is the fourth and final volume of George Orwell’s collected letters, essays and reviews, covering the period from 1945 through to Orwell’s death in January 1950 (though the last letter is dated October 1949). There’s much less journalism and opinion in this volume than previous ones; In Front of Your Nose consists largely of letters, which is understandable, since Orwell spent most of this period writing 1984 on a remote Scottish island, or slowly dying of tuberculosis in a hospital bed.

The dominance of letters is probably why I didn’t enjoy this volume as much as the last one; there are some brilliant essays in here, as you would expect from a writer at his peak, but I’d read most of them before in Shooting an Elephant. There was also something actually quite sad about reading the letters Orwell wrote in 1948 and 1949 as he was admitted to hospital; I knew he was headed for a slow and early death, but he didn’t know that, at least not until the end. The very last line in the book, drawn from a “Extracts From a Manuscript Notebook,” is:

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Which was perhaps a reflection on healthy habits and clean living (not that Orwell was in favour of either). He never reached 50, which is a great shame, because society was robbed of his insights into the post-war military-industrial complex, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Thatcherism, and – if we were really lucky – the early 2000s and the Iraq War.
Nevertheless, even dying at a mere 46 years of age, Orwell was easily one of the most important writers of the 20th century. This four-volume set of his collected works is not for everyone, brimming as it is with personal correspondence and reviews of books that have long since vanished, but I greatly enjoyed reading it. I personally rate Orwell’s non-fiction better than his classic novels Animal Farm and 1984, and if you don’t at least read a few of his best essays, you can’t properly claim to have read Orwell.

If you love Orwell, you'll want to read this. This volume of Orwell's collected essays, journalism, and letters contains a few of Orwell's well known essays that I enjoyed reading for a second time, as well as a lot of journalism and letters covering all kinds of subjects. I kept this on my bedside table and slowly picked through it over the course of a year, but it was always interesting and I found a lot to admire in it.

It has taken me an awful long time to read this series. I read the first volume when I was at college and I find myself completing it at a similar age to Orwell when he died. Although it these things were written over 50 years ago, they still have the capacity to interest and invite some thought about the political siyuation now. For example, the review of Zamayatin's "WE" encouraged me to take a look at that book and be surprised that I was so ignorant of a fantastically important book. The letters help to humanise the writer and enable the reader to understand where his thinking came from. A great series a kind of alternative history to the early 20th century.

Some seem very old. Some seem very new.

How did he do it? Even while suffering from tuberculosis? The intellectual range and sheer productivity represented here are astounding.