Orwell

George Orwell (1903-1950) is Britain’s most famous political writer. He aspired to be a novelist, but it was with his reportage on the conditions of the poor and on the Spanish Civil War, and his journalism on popular culture and politics, that he became a leading observer of his times. With his last books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he became a global icon, leaving ideas and terms that continue to shape political and cultural debate. In this controversial new biography, Scott Lucas argues that we now need to be rescued from Orwell. Orwell was never really a socialist, Lucas argues, and, in spite of his interest in "clear writing", he remained as confused in his politics as he was talented and prolific in prose. Most strikingly, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell passed a list of ‘suspect’ individuals, from Charlie Chaplin to Michael Redgrave, to British Intelligence. Since his death, Lucas suggests, Orwell has become a talisman for the neoliberal right, for "little England", and even for an American-led world.