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So the question that hangs over Orwell is the one that always hangs over so many well-heeled revolutionaries: did he want to level up society or level it down? The evidence points to the latter. The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal--the one that was, ironically en…

[...] This semi-fictional England, beautifully described in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' and given body in his popular columns, was a rather shabby, stoical, anti-American ideally classless place, devoted to small English pleasures like marmalade and suet pudding and fishing in country ponds, puritan…

[...] an actual revolution, in Russia, with its abuses of power and privilege, necessarily disappointed him, because it contaminated the ideal. Orwell became not so much anti-revolutionary as anti-revolution. He used an ideal revolution to scourge an actual one--which is a negative form of messiani…

[...] And the story ends there, where it has to, at a perfect zero of hope.

[...] The autobiographical atmosphere thickens in the last two hundred pages of the book. You could be utterly ignorant of Lydia Davis's personal circumstances and still be pretty sure, on the evidence of the stories, that her parents have died in the last ten years or so. Several of the later text…