To borrow from Kubrick's Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket, there is some irony (or not) in the "duality" of the works of a great writer (see also Jung). I often think it is a shame when less famous works are buried in the shadows of works such as Animal Farm and 1984. But it is equally pleasing to find gems that others have not bastardised to death through popularity contests. Much like finding George Bernard Shaw's self-proclaimed masterpiece, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, this short collection of essays, particularly "Charles Dickens" and "Nationalism", still resonates today. It makes me wonder why we let such formerly exposed knowledge lapse. Yet without the "Born to Kill", I suppose there really would be no "Peace". ( )

Some essays by George Orwell, a bit of a mixed bag without anything that particularly stood out for me. I liked the shorter political pieces more than the literary criticism I guess, and 'A Hanging' is a powerful short piece. ( )

The Penguin repackaging of George Orwell's essays leads to volumes with considerable overlap. To get new stuff, you get additional copies of the more famous works. There are seven essays here that I had not encountered earlier. The trend in this collection is fewer politics and more on literature. We get Orwell on Kipling, and on Dickens, as well as his take on the noire world of "Orchids For Miss Blandish". All the essays are readable, and the duplicates include some signature Orwells. ( )

This is a book of ten essays, which starts with one of the shortest, titled The Decline of the English Murder, which amused me, though I think he does have a serious point. The essay on Dickens takes up about a third of the book, and is an interesting essay that analyses the reasons for his enduring appeal, what can be seen of the good character of Dickens from his stories, and also the things that seem to be absent from his writing.
I was pleased to find that Orwell shared my opinions on Dali, who I have instinctively had a moral repulsion towards since I was taken round his museum in Barcelona as an impressionable boy. Orwell goes to some length in explaining the character of Dali, which in turn explains much of the obscenity in some of his paintings.
Most of the the essays seem to involve some observation and analysis of society, class, politics, and changing tastes. A good example of this is the essay on comic postcards, which I thought was rather acute, despite it being a paticularly non-serious topic. ( )

What is indicated (at least in some of the more politically cynical group of essays) is that Orwell has had a profound impact on our contemporary and faithful oppurtunist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens' prose as well as many of his quirks are quite easily traced back to Orwell's vitriol filled ink well. However I think that Orwell (as history has demonstrated) was no opportunist, he was quite justifiably disillusioned with left-wing politics, but at least he had hope.

My first impression is that Orwell has completely misread Trotskyism, or perhaps I have misread what Orwell's stances are on it. He couples Trotskyism with nationalism as one in the same...which quite frankly given the internationalist tendencies of "permanent revolution", I don't see how one could be so mistaken. In an eerie way his essays on politics and the British and American Intelligentsia mirror Hitchens' rants about "Islamofascism", (terrible term) and theocratic-friendly press and intelligentsia. Orwell employed the term "Russophile" ad nauseum in two of his essays. An immediatley contemptous term, "Russophile" applied to those who in his eyes blindly accepted the new religion of Marxism as it had been expressed in the Communist Party of Russia. He blanketed this term upon Anglo and American Stalinists, Trotskyists, and Communists...which is of course absurd, given the actual tendencies of these different groups. Both the substance and direction of these political entities (especially in the case of Stalinism and Trotskyism)were quite different.

On a lighter note, his criticism of Salvador Dali as a human being and an artist was riveting. Though it was rigorous in the decimation of his character, it oddly had me much more interested in Dali as a person and artist as nothing else did before. There's always something compelling about a "disgusting human being". His critique of Dickens, his naivete, his bourgeois dreams, and simple even childish schemes to make the world a better place, again ironically made me interested in Dickens and his body of work.
This is the craft of Orwell and of our contemporary Hitchens (who has as many of you know has written a book about Orwell); their contempt draws you in to look at what someone could be so angry about. However sadly, I think cynicism has crept slowly over both leaving their faculties immersed in a hopeless cycle of knowing too much and not knowing what to do with it. ( ( )