he seems, self-abnegatingly, to want to taste the sweat on the meat, as a salty political reminder.

he was greatly talented at describing closed worlds, and adumbrating their conventions

Orwell was suspicious of this indeterminate, petit bourgeois class, because it wanted to change itself first, and society second.

Conservative readers excoriated what the radicals most liked

his anxious self-deceptions and labile confessions seem modern

his melodramatic, libretto-like plots

The zeugma of 'families and shipwrecks in the newspaper' is marvellous.

the usual manner in which contemporary criticism elides the question of authorial intention

if one takes postmodernism's proffered exit and happily turns the novels into fascinating melodramatic bricolage

although they preserve such experience, they do so at a mimetic remove