[...] Moses, speaking on behalf of the Lord, threatens a hell in which the Israelites will not even be competent slaves:

[...] and you will put yourselves up for sale there to your enemies as male slaves and slavegirls, and there will be no buyer.

[...] when he finally has the chance to cut down a Frenchman, he cannot do it, because the soldier's face is not that of an enemy but 'a most simple, homelike face'. He gets a medal and is even called a hero, but can only think: 'So that's all there is to so-called heroism?' [...]

[...] Napoleon, the genius of world history, failed in battle; but the amateur, unheroic blunderers, Nikolai and Pierre, survived into peace, surrounded by women, who do not understand warfare, and by children, who must not. To live, writes the poet Yehuda Amichai, is to build a ship and a harbour at the same time: 'And to finish the harbour / long after the ship has gone down.'

[...] The autobiographical atmosphere thickens in the last two hundred pages of the book. You could be utterly ignorant of Lydia Davis's personal circumstances and still be pretty sure, on the evidence of the stories, that her parents have died in the last ten years or so. Several of the later texts have the ashen pallor of elegy. [...]

[...] And the story ends there, where it has to, at a perfect zero of hope.

[...] an actual revolution, in Russia, with its abuses of power and privilege, necessarily disappointed him, because it contaminated the ideal. Orwell became not so much anti-revolutionary as anti-revolution. He used an ideal revolution to scourge an actual one--which is a negative form of messianism, really.

When I first read 'The Lion and the Unicorn', I was so blinded by flag-waving lines like 'And if the rich squeal audibly, so much the better', and 'The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering's bombing planes', that I missed this incoherence. To someone surrounded by alien acres of privilege, Orwell's relentless attack on privilege seemed a necessary, obliterating forest fire: 'What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old . . . We have got to fight against privilege.' Nowadays, I'm struck by the fact that throughout his work, Orwell is much more vocal about the abolition of power and privilege than about equitable redistribution, let alone the means and machinery of that redistribution. There is a fine spirit of optimistic destruction in his work, a sense that if we all just work hard at that crucial, negating 'shove from below', then the upper-class toffs will simply fade away, and things will more or less work out in the interests of justice. In 'The Lion and the Unicorn', there is a suggestive moment when Orwell writes that collective deprivation may be more necessary than political programmes: 'In the short run, equality of sacrifice, "war-Communism", is even more important than radical economic changes. It is very necessary that industry should be nationalised, but it is more urgently necessary that such monstrosities as butlers and "private incomes" should disappear forthwith.' In other words, let's agree to be a bit vague about the economic stuff, like industrial policy; and let's keep the serious rhetoric for the lady in the Rolls, about whom we can be militantly precise. [...]

[...] 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.

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. [...]

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 rural isolation [...]; or more simply, that the hater of private schools put his adopted son down for Westminster, one of the grandest london academies. So Orwell was contradictory: contradictions are what make writers interesting; consistency is for cooking. Instead, one is gratefully struck by how prescient Orwell was, by how much he got right. [...]

[...] Has anyone described the way light changes during the morning better than Hardy does, in his poem 'The Going': 'while I / Saw morning harden upon the wall'? One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete.