New Statesman and Nation, 9 January 1943 One cannot adequately review fifteen pamphlets in a thousand words, and if I have picked out that number it is because between them they make a representative selection of eight out of the nine main trends in current pamphleteering. (The missing trend is pacifism: I don’t happen...
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Adelphi, October 1941 Mr Murry1 said years ago that the works of the best modern writers, Joyce, Eliot and the like, simply demonstrated the impossibility of great art in a time like the present, and since then we have moved onwards into a period in which any sort of joy in writing, any such...
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Poetry London, October-November 1942; reprinted in Little Reviews Anthology, edited by Denys Val Baker, 1943. There is very little in Eliot’s later work that makes any deep impression on me. That is a confession of something lacking in myself, but it is not, as it may appear at first sight, a reason for simply...
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Time and Tide, 13 April 1940 Julian Green’s diaries, which ten years ago or even five years ago might have seemed comparatively commonplace, are at this moment of the greatest interest. What they really record is the twilight of the aesthetic age, the last gasp of the cultivated second-generation rentier. With his extreme sensitiveness...
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Tribune, 12 July 1940 The reprinting of Jack London’s The Iron Heel brings within general reach a book which has been much sought after during the years of Fascist aggression. Like others of Jack London’s books it has been widely read in Germany, and it has had the reputation of being an accurate forecast...
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Tribune, 30 April 1943 Anyone who has had to do propaganda to “friendly” countries must envy the European Service of the B.B.C. They are playing on such an easy wicket! People living under a foreign occupation are necessarily hungry for news, and by making it a penal offence to listen in to Allied broadcasts...
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Anonymous review published in The Listener on 12 January 1938. The records of The Listener show that George Orwell was paid £1 for writing this review. Mr. Warren was an assistant in one of the big timber firms and was in Burma five years, including the bad period of the rebellion. Between 1928 and...
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Unsigned review by George Orwell. The Listener, 21 January 1943. It is a pity that this large and careful survey could not have had a short appendix indicating what effect the war has had on our drinking habits. It seems to have been compiled just before the war, and even in that short period...
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A review by George Orwell in Horizon, July 1942. In this war we have one weapon which our enemies cannot use against us, and that is the English language. Several other languages are spoken by larger numbers of people, but there is no other that has any claim to be a world-wide lingua franca....
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The Listener, 9 March 1938. As with all reviews published anonymously in The Listener, attribution to Orwell has been made from the journal’s records. This is an unpretentious book, but it brings out with unusual clearness the dilemma that faces every official in an empire like our own. Mr. Collis was District Magistrate of...
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