[...] 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, puritanical about large luxuries like the Ritz Hotel and Rolls-Royces, and suspicious of modern conveniences like aspirins, plate glass, shiny American apples, cars and radios. There is an undoubted comedy in Orwell's never having realised that what was obviously utopia to him might strike at least half the population as a chaste nightmare.