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Possibly Blair-Orwell was corrected too often in youth to brook it afterward. Though he tots up for the record the mistakes in prophecy he has made in his “London Letter” to Partisan Review, he is generally convinced of his own rightness. Once he has changed his mind he seems to be unconscious of h…

Though aware of the impossibility of it, he would have liked to find some acid test to subject works of art to which would tell the scientific investigator whether they were good or bad. Survival, he typically decided, was the only measure of greatness, but of course this leaves the problem of what…

He hated intellectuals, pansies, and “rich swine,” as he called millionaires, and nothing made him angrier during the war than the fact that repairs were being made to the empty grand houses in the West End. He was also incensed at the suggestion that rationing should end. His extreme egalitarianis…

It is as though, once he had resigned from the Indian Service, he wished to be acted upon, rather than to act, that is, to follow the line of least resistance and see where it led—a quite common impulse in a writer, based on a mystical feeling that the will is evil. Blair-Orwell detested and resent…

In fact the term “committed literature” is an antique, dating back to the post-war period and designating an alliance of certain writers with the then-Stalinist Party. It has no other meaning—as was demonstrated, if that was necessary, by the two speakers’ reluctance to define it—and for the radica…