7 ms·

Any recommendations for other writings and analyses by Orwell?

ambrozk 4y ago
Down and Out in London and Paris is a great, great memoir. It's 50% Kitchen Confidential, 50% tramping in England during the Depression. I really can't communicate how readable and fun it is.
jvalenzu 4y ago
Homage to Catalonia is his highly personal analysis of the events of the Spanish Civil War. It isn't at all comprehensive, but very plain spoken and perceptive and helps frame all of his fictional work.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  His description of trench warfare and hand to hand combat is horrifying. I understood his views on communism better after reading the book.
  - robocat 4y ago
    The words “communism” and “socialism” have particularly slippery modern meanings - they depend where you are internationally, in time, and your partisanship. I have read a lot of what he wrote, and I am still unsure what he exactly meant by socialism. I find his essay ‘On Nationalism’ difficult to follow, although very interesting. I love all his writings about his own experiences, because his observations are so exceptionally well written, with the foreignness of early last century, plus the familiarity of his daily life. He then often writes later in those books about his political thoughts, which can be a bit more difficult to read e.g. Road to Wigan Pier.
    - smackeyacky 4y ago
      The US is the only place where the word "Socialism" isn't used properly. The rest of the world understands it perfectly well.
      - School-Cotton 4y ago
        Would you argue that the French socialist party is socialist for example? What do you claim “socialism” means?
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Not really, no. Most of Europe isn't using it properly, either - those "democratic socialist" parties aren't socialist.
        fredgrott 4y ago
        to add to that look at what the letters USSR and DDR stood for... IN case no one remembers United Socialist Soviet Republic Deutsch Democratic Republic both not word plays on Democracy but word plays on social theory and what stateless means.
        int_19h 4y ago
        USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I'm not sure what you mean by "word plays on social theory and what stateless means". Both are perfectly descriptive labels; they just lie.
    - littlestymaar 4y ago
      > I have read a lot of what he wrote, and I am still unsure what he exactly meant by socialism. Depends what you mean by “exactly”. Having a precise vision of everything Orwell puts under the “socialism” umbrella, is of course impossible, but at the same time, there are things that are clear: when he says socialism he definitely means means no capitalism, that is no bourgeoisie sitting atop the society by the virtue of being the owning class.
    - culi 4y ago
      At that time in Europe "socialism" basically just meant "good". It was a stand in for a government where you care about each other. Then there's the more "theoretical" definition of socialism. In the US it might seem bewildering why Orwell considered the anarchists of that war to be the "true socialists" (despite Orwell being a communist, he had a lot of support for them). But the truth is that both anarchism and communism far pretty well within the boundaries of socialist theory historically. And that's quite evident when you think about the fact that the final goal of both of these theories is a stateless society
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        What Orwell wrote about the Communists in Spain would not lead anyone to place him among them.
        adrian_b 4y ago
        That what he wrote was written after he knew from personal experience the reality of Communism, which converted him from a supporter of Communism into an opponent of it.
        qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
        There was a infamous forgotten year, were europes "on party line" communists (also in england) cheered on germany, because that was a ally of moscow then. Those who hated on orwell, really showed their colors back then. Totalitarians, just with different decorations.
      - VieEnCode 4y ago
        Orwell wasn’t a communist. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
        typon 4y ago
        Not sure if this is a joke, but you are equating communism with totalitarianism, which is the opposite
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Read that recently. I'd advice anyone who reads it and isn't familiar with the time period to at least get an overview of the factions involved. Worst part of the book IMHO (though it wouldn't be fair to blame Orwell for that).
Fnoord 4y ago
Other than what? This? 1984 and Animal Farm? I saw the (?) cartoon Animal Farm on elementary school.
scifibestfi 4y ago
Politics and the English Language, Animal Farm, 1984
teamonkey 4y ago
Down and Out in Paris and London.
- kergonath 4y ago
  This one is very unfairly ignored all too often. The details may have changed since then (not too much, though), but everything is spot on. I remember reading this living between jobs on a couple of quid a day in a hostel and thinking that the similarities really were uncanny. Except for the work houses, luckily this bit is gone from Western Europe. What really struck me was how plain it was that laws and rules that are supposed to apply equally to everyone often have in-built repressive aspects, like the fact that you could get fined and jailed for sleeping rough. This is wonderfully summarised by a quote that I found only later: “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” So yes, Down and out is a must read, just as much as Animal farm and 1984.
  - arethuza 4y ago
    It's an excellent book - my particular favourite part being the bit about being a plongeur at "Hotel X".
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
- Christopher Hitchens (possibly THE biggest expert on Orwell in the late 20th century, and a great intellectual IMHO) on "Why Orwell Matters" + Q&A (2002) [0]. - Why I write [1] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-FfrkGiWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-FfrkGiWQ [1]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- robocat 4y ago
  Perhaps skip 12 minutes 30 into the YouTube video to where he starts talking about George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) if you want to avoid a long-winded intro.
- harry8 4y ago
  Counterpoint: Christopher Hitchens was an expert on sophistry in the manner of a champion high school debater and doesn't deserve the reflected glory of being noted as "the" Orwell expert. Orwell was rather more courageous, incisive, intelligent, subtle, humane and kind. Hitchens is not in the same intellectual league let alone the same ballpark. Hitchens sucessfully hitched his wagon to Orwell's intellectual greatness for popularity and debating points but when you scratch the surface there seems to be less there than we'd like. Everyone has the right to a different opinion than me on Hitchens and I think my politics are probably closer to (late stage) Hitchens than Orwell and I think I'm surely no more a great intellectual than Hitchens. Orwell really was a great intellectual, this is clear to me even if I think he was wrong about a bunch of stuff. Where I agree with Hitchens it remains lightweight by comparison.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    > Christopher Hitchens was an expert on sophistry in the manner of a champion high school debater and doesn't deserve the reflected glory of being noted as "the" Orwell expert. I love Hitchens, and agree with you 100%.
Bud 4y ago
Since nobody else has brought them up yet, I would recommend ALL of Orwell's Essays, which can be had in various editions.
- oxfeed65261 4y ago
  See “ESSAYS AND OTHER WORKS: A selection of essays, articles, sketches, reviews and scripts written by Orwell. This material remains under copyright in the US and is reproduced here with the kind assistance of the Orwell Estate.” “Politics and the English Language” is a particular delight. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- pyuser583 4y ago
  I’ll have to read them. Some of the most fascinating ideas I’ve come across were in some “Essays by Some Great Writer Known For A Single Novel.” And it’s fun because I’m one of may a few hundred people on the planet to have read them.
efxhoy 4y ago
Shooting an elephant is a brilliant short essay from his time as a police officer in Burma. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- junon 4y ago
  I think about this piece often after reading it for the first time roughly a year ago. The way he paints the picture really stuck with me, a very vivid depiction.
int_19h 4y ago
"The Freedom of the Press". It was meant to be a preface to the "Animal Farm", but ended up getting effectively censored (by publishers, not by the government) for decades. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... What I found striking is how much of the landscape described there is familiar aside from the names. "One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought." "But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice." "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." What's even more striking is that it's a socialist writing this. I'm far left myself and I'm with Orwell on this subject, but I see very few fellow lefties who are; as a whole, they're far more interested in deriding "freeze peach". Indeed, the quotes above would likely be quite sufficient by themselves to "cancel" Orwell if he were alive today - and I didn't even bring up the meatier parts where he e.g. defends Moseley's due process rights.
krebby 4y ago
One of my favorites is The Road to Wigan Pier, which investigates living conditions of the British working classes. He fairly deftly draws a line between wages and social reforms in part 1, and why the working class largely don't identify as socialists in part 2. Fantastic read.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Yes, although in The Road to Wigan Pier you really see how socially conservative Orwell was. His complaints about socialists weren't just that many of them were well-off people out of touch with the real problems of the working class (in which he had a point), but also that some of them were vegetarians, some birth-control advocates, some didn't drink alcohol or smoke, and (although Orwell says this indirectly) some of them were gay. Orwell claimed that the working class didn't like these traits, but really, it was Orwell himself who didn't. His imagined working class was basically himself if he had been a factory worker rather than a writer.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Isn't the working class almost always more socially conservative than the middle and upper classes? It's certainly true of our time. AFAICT his analysis still rings true.
    - jhbadger 4y ago
      Well, that's debatable. Yes, certainly right wing populists (who are often funded by billionaires and/or are so themselves) like to claim that working class people are socially conservative and that the "elite" are the ones that are trying to instigate social change, but there seems to be quite a mix of social views at all strata of society.
      - LAC-Tech 4y ago
        It's very hard to qualify, I suppose. We just have our anecdotes. I've definitely noticed that the more formal education people have had - and the better they've done in that system - the less socially conservative they are. I live in a rural working class area but work remotely with middle class professionals from big cities, there's a pretty distinct divide in social attitudes. As for attitudes in the upper class, I can't speak to that.
mhh__ 4y ago
The series "As I please" is very good.
dbtc 4y ago
I highly recommend "On Politics and English." https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
Anthony-G 4y ago
One of my favourites is very short (but not sweet): https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/a-nice-cup-of-tea/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... I only started drinking tea a few years ago and found this advice to stand the test of time.
zeendo 4y ago
"Facing Unpleasant Facts" is a fantastic collection of his essays. Highly recommended.

Down and Out in London and Paris is a great, great memoir. It's 50% Kitchen Confidential, 50% tramping in England during the Depression. I really can't communicate how readable and fun it is.

jvalenzu 4y ago

Homage to Catalonia is his highly personal analysis of the events of the Spanish Civil War. It isn't at all comprehensive, but very plain spoken and perceptive and helps frame all of his fictional work.

lostlogin 4y ago
His description of trench warfare and hand to hand combat is horrifying. I understood his views on communism better after reading the book.
- robocat 4y ago
  The words “communism” and “socialism” have particularly slippery modern meanings - they depend where you are internationally, in time, and your partisanship. I have read a lot of what he wrote, and I am still unsure what he exactly meant by socialism. I find his essay ‘On Nationalism’ difficult to follow, although very interesting. I love all his writings about his own experiences, because his observations are so exceptionally well written, with the foreignness of early last century, plus the familiarity of his daily life. He then often writes later in those books about his political thoughts, which can be a bit more difficult to read e.g. Road to Wigan Pier.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    The US is the only place where the word "Socialism" isn't used properly. The rest of the world understands it perfectly well.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      Would you argue that the French socialist party is socialist for example? What do you claim “socialism” means?
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Not really, no. Most of Europe isn't using it properly, either - those "democratic socialist" parties aren't socialist.
      - fredgrott 4y ago
        to add to that look at what the letters USSR and DDR stood for... IN case no one remembers United Socialist Soviet Republic Deutsch Democratic Republic both not word plays on Democracy but word plays on social theory and what stateless means.
        int_19h 4y ago
        USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I'm not sure what you mean by "word plays on social theory and what stateless means". Both are perfectly descriptive labels; they just lie.
  - littlestymaar 4y ago
    > I have read a lot of what he wrote, and I am still unsure what he exactly meant by socialism. Depends what you mean by “exactly”. Having a precise vision of everything Orwell puts under the “socialism” umbrella, is of course impossible, but at the same time, there are things that are clear: when he says socialism he definitely means means no capitalism, that is no bourgeoisie sitting atop the society by the virtue of being the owning class.
  - culi 4y ago
    At that time in Europe "socialism" basically just meant "good". It was a stand in for a government where you care about each other. Then there's the more "theoretical" definition of socialism. In the US it might seem bewildering why Orwell considered the anarchists of that war to be the "true socialists" (despite Orwell being a communist, he had a lot of support for them). But the truth is that both anarchism and communism far pretty well within the boundaries of socialist theory historically. And that's quite evident when you think about the fact that the final goal of both of these theories is a stateless society
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      What Orwell wrote about the Communists in Spain would not lead anyone to place him among them.
      - adrian_b 4y ago
        That what he wrote was written after he knew from personal experience the reality of Communism, which converted him from a supporter of Communism into an opponent of it.
        qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
        There was a infamous forgotten year, were europes "on party line" communists (also in england) cheered on germany, because that was a ally of moscow then. Those who hated on orwell, really showed their colors back then. Totalitarians, just with different decorations.
    - VieEnCode 4y ago
      Orwell wasn’t a communist. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
      - typon 4y ago
        Not sure if this is a joke, but you are equating communism with totalitarianism, which is the opposite
_Algernon_ 4y ago
Read that recently. I'd advice anyone who reads it and isn't familiar with the time period to at least get an overview of the factions involved. Worst part of the book IMHO (though it wouldn't be fair to blame Orwell for that).

Fnoord 4y ago

Other than what? This? 1984 and Animal Farm? I saw the (?) cartoon Animal Farm on elementary school.

scifibestfi 4y ago

Politics and the English Language, Animal Farm, 1984

teamonkey 4y ago

Down and Out in Paris and London.

kergonath 4y ago
This one is very unfairly ignored all too often. The details may have changed since then (not too much, though), but everything is spot on. I remember reading this living between jobs on a couple of quid a day in a hostel and thinking that the similarities really were uncanny. Except for the work houses, luckily this bit is gone from Western Europe. What really struck me was how plain it was that laws and rules that are supposed to apply equally to everyone often have in-built repressive aspects, like the fact that you could get fined and jailed for sleeping rough. This is wonderfully summarised by a quote that I found only later: “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” So yes, Down and out is a must read, just as much as Animal farm and 1984.
- arethuza 4y ago
  It's an excellent book - my particular favourite part being the bit about being a plongeur at "Hotel X".

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

- Christopher Hitchens (possibly THE biggest expert on Orwell in the late 20th century, and a great intellectual IMHO) on "Why Orwell Matters" + Q&A (2002) [0]. - Why I write [1] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-FfrkGiWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-FfrkGiWQ [1]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

robocat 4y ago
Perhaps skip 12 minutes 30 into the YouTube video to where he starts talking about George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) if you want to avoid a long-winded intro.
harry8 4y ago
Counterpoint: Christopher Hitchens was an expert on sophistry in the manner of a champion high school debater and doesn't deserve the reflected glory of being noted as "the" Orwell expert. Orwell was rather more courageous, incisive, intelligent, subtle, humane and kind. Hitchens is not in the same intellectual league let alone the same ballpark. Hitchens sucessfully hitched his wagon to Orwell's intellectual greatness for popularity and debating points but when you scratch the surface there seems to be less there than we'd like. Everyone has the right to a different opinion than me on Hitchens and I think my politics are probably closer to (late stage) Hitchens than Orwell and I think I'm surely no more a great intellectual than Hitchens. Orwell really was a great intellectual, this is clear to me even if I think he was wrong about a bunch of stuff. Where I agree with Hitchens it remains lightweight by comparison.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  > Christopher Hitchens was an expert on sophistry in the manner of a champion high school debater and doesn't deserve the reflected glory of being noted as "the" Orwell expert. I love Hitchens, and agree with you 100%.

Bud 4y ago

Since nobody else has brought them up yet, I would recommend ALL of Orwell's Essays, which can be had in various editions.

oxfeed65261 4y ago
See “ESSAYS AND OTHER WORKS: A selection of essays, articles, sketches, reviews and scripts written by Orwell. This material remains under copyright in the US and is reproduced here with the kind assistance of the Orwell Estate.” “Politics and the English Language” is a particular delight. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
pyuser583 4y ago
I’ll have to read them. Some of the most fascinating ideas I’ve come across were in some “Essays by Some Great Writer Known For A Single Novel.” And it’s fun because I’m one of may a few hundred people on the planet to have read them.

efxhoy 4y ago

Shooting an elephant is a brilliant short essay from his time as a police officer in Burma. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

junon 4y ago
I think about this piece often after reading it for the first time roughly a year ago. The way he paints the picture really stuck with me, a very vivid depiction.

int_19h 4y ago

"The Freedom of the Press". It was meant to be a preface to the "Animal Farm", but ended up getting effectively censored (by publishers, not by the government) for decades. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... What I found striking is how much of the landscape described there is familiar aside from the names. "One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought." "But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice." "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." What's even more striking is that it's a socialist writing this. I'm far left myself and I'm with Orwell on this subject, but I see very few fellow lefties who are; as a whole, they're far more interested in deriding "freeze peach". Indeed, the quotes above would likely be quite sufficient by themselves to "cancel" Orwell if he were alive today - and I didn't even bring up the meatier parts where he e.g. defends Moseley's due process rights.

krebby 4y ago

One of my favorites is The Road to Wigan Pier, which investigates living conditions of the British working classes. He fairly deftly draws a line between wages and social reforms in part 1, and why the working class largely don't identify as socialists in part 2. Fantastic read.

jhbadger 4y ago
Yes, although in The Road to Wigan Pier you really see how socially conservative Orwell was. His complaints about socialists weren't just that many of them were well-off people out of touch with the real problems of the working class (in which he had a point), but also that some of them were vegetarians, some birth-control advocates, some didn't drink alcohol or smoke, and (although Orwell says this indirectly) some of them were gay. Orwell claimed that the working class didn't like these traits, but really, it was Orwell himself who didn't. His imagined working class was basically himself if he had been a factory worker rather than a writer.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Isn't the working class almost always more socially conservative than the middle and upper classes? It's certainly true of our time. AFAICT his analysis still rings true.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Well, that's debatable. Yes, certainly right wing populists (who are often funded by billionaires and/or are so themselves) like to claim that working class people are socially conservative and that the "elite" are the ones that are trying to instigate social change, but there seems to be quite a mix of social views at all strata of society.
    - LAC-Tech 4y ago
      It's very hard to qualify, I suppose. We just have our anecdotes. I've definitely noticed that the more formal education people have had - and the better they've done in that system - the less socially conservative they are. I live in a rural working class area but work remotely with middle class professionals from big cities, there's a pretty distinct divide in social attitudes. As for attitudes in the upper class, I can't speak to that.

mhh__ 4y ago

The series "As I please" is very good.

dbtc 4y ago

I highly recommend "On Politics and English." https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

Anthony-G 4y ago

One of my favourites is very short (but not sweet): https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/a-nice-cup-of-tea/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... I only started drinking tea a few years ago and found this advice to stand the test of time.

zeendo 4y ago

"Facing Unpleasant Facts" is a fantastic collection of his essays. Highly recommended.