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 enough, inherited--was the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus in some sense, to obliterate himself. This was, at bottom, a religious impulse, and was not always politically coherent. [...]