George Orwell

“The fascination of Down and Out in Paris and London is that it’s his first book. In it, you can see Orwell stumbling, moving towards the kind of writer he wants to be, choosing the sort of subject matter he thinks will be appropriate. He spent time in Paris, working humbly in hotels and restaurants as what the French called a plongeur, someone who basically does the washing up. Then, he came back to England and went on what he called his ‘tramping adventures,’ masquerading as a down and out.” Read more...

The Best George Orwell Books

D J Taylor, Biographer

“For fiction about Burma, I suppose you should start with the classic of all time, which has to be Orwell’s Burmese Days. The story is about John Flory, a timber merchant in Burma, who’s a bit disillusioned and nothing much is happening to him. Everything is based around the English Club, with all the tiny things that put you wrong, and it’s such a mean, bitchy little place. It’s terribly snooty, and they don’t want Flory’s Indian friend Dr Veeraswami to become a member. It’s just wonderful: funny, ironic, a horribly sad portrait of colonial life.” Read more...

The best books on Describing Burma

Sue Arnold, Journalist

“The great fascination to me of A Clergyman’s Daughter is that although it’s published in the UK in 1935, it is essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which doesn’t appear until fourteen years later. It’s about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about. It makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise.” Read more...

The Best George Orwell Books

D J Taylor, Biographer

“It fits absolutely wonderfully in the trajectory of that route to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s about a frustrated poet and embittered bookseller’s assistant called Gordon Comstock who works in a bookshop in Hampstead in North London, is completely disillusioned with the world, and rails against what he calls as the ‘money God’. He’s an anti-capitalist without really understanding how political systems work. The novel was written in the 1930s before Orwell had actually nailed his colors to the political mast.” Read more...

The Best George Orwell Books

D J Taylor, Biographer

“The Road to Wigan Pier is a very transitional book. It shows all the attention to detail and the thought of street-level reportage that distinguishes Down and Out in Paris and London, but it’s moving forward to a political position—the political position—that will underlie what Orwell starts writing in the 1940s, for which we now celebrate him.” Read more...

The Best George Orwell Books

D J Taylor, Biographer

“The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia…is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts. He comes to understand what Soviet power actually is, and that it is qualitatively different to the other sorts of Spanish left, or to European left-wing intellectuals or Labour in England. The difference is not just a matter of being on a different point of the spectrum. It is to do with the immediate violence of Soviet means which were visible to Orwell at that time and place…He describes what is happening in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War in such a way that we are able to see why he’s so upset about Soviet power.” Read more...

The best books on Dissent

Timothy Snyder, Historian

“This book was published in June 1939, just before the start of the war. It’s all about the war looming over Britain and its effect on the people. It tells the story of a 45-year-old man called George Bowling. It’s a midlife crisis story…he decides to go back to his home town, Lower Binfield, as he has all these nostalgic memories of Edwardian Britain there, of meadows and fishing and beautiful girls who fancied him and good friends and all the things he feels are missing from his drudgery of a life. So he goes back and of course he finds the same thing he has found in London. Things are different and people have changed. He blames capitalism and progress. His nostalgia is destroyed…It’s all about the loss of that idyllic Britain, and loss of that perfect imagined England.” Read more...

The best books on Myths of War

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“Animal Farm sticks in everybody’s mind. ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’. Again, this is something read twice. I read it for the first time when I was 14 or 15 and it was a funny story about badly behaved animals, but then I read it again at college and someone pointed out to me that this was sharp social satire. I thought it was an animal story, a kids’ book, but when I took another look at it I realised what he was getting at. The Soviet leadership was pretty well represented there.” Read more...

The Best Political Satire Books

P. J. O’Rourke, Political Commentator

“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient…Orwell is of perennial fascination to me because…he straddles the world of investigative journalism and fiction. He also deliberately chose to experience different levels of society, which I believe is essential for a novelist interested in the truth about the way we live now. He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies. Orwell saw the death of the dream at first-hand in Spain. He was in contact with a lot of communists, and fought on their sides against Fascism but, as Stalin’s Russia gained power, he could see this dream of equality that so many idealistic and young people have shared leaves a nightmare, just like Fascism. Anything other than democracy and truth leaves the jackboot stamping eternally into the human face, as Winston realises. His hero Winston is named, of course, after Winston Churchill” Read more...

Books that Changed the World

Amanda Craig, Journalist

“In these essays, his essential message is that clear writing is a product of clear thinking, and, conversely, often muddled writing is a consequence of muddled thinking, so it’s a great plea for clarity of thought allied to clarity of expression. He writes about the decline of the English murder, watching a hanging out in Burma and, in my favourite, which is called ‘Politics and the English Language’, quite a short four- or five-thousand-word essay he wrote in the mid-1940s, he deplores the slovenliness of quite a lot of political writing and journalism. He goes through some real examples. Over the years when any youngster has asked me about becoming a journalist, I say, ‘Read ‘Politics and the English Language’. If you absorb that and take the advice you are halfway there.’” Read more...

The best books on British Democracy

Peter Kellner, Journalist