I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ For Orwell, this meant an ability to face not only that...

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and...

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of...

It’s shameful that today’s mouthy political expositors aren’t better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn’t studied Shakespeare?

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

In The Captive Mind, written in the early 1950s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote that Eastern European intellectuals, reading 1984 in clandestine editions, were amazed to find that its author had never visited the Soviet Union. How,...

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.