Activity

his melodramatic, libretto-like plots

his anxious self-deceptions and labile confessions seem modern

Conservative readers excoriated what the radicals most liked

Orwell feared what he most desired: the future. But it is easy to gloat over Orwell's contradictions--to point out that he wrote so well about the drabness and horror of totalitarianism because he himself had a tendency to drab omnipotence; or that the great proponent of urban collectivity liked ru…