Orwell’s eye for nature, spotting a heron flying over London’s Baker Street and a kestrel making a kill in the centre of Lord’s cricket ground.

Orwell’s honest opinion about Stephen Spender and his poetry in print (rude, and dismissive), then explaining to Spender in a letter that that was because he hadn’t actually met Spender in person and would Spender like to do him a talk for the BBC?.

When he was working on the early shift at the BBC, he claimed that the sound of the massed ranks of charladies singing as they mopped the passages first thing in the morning was the only music the BBC had all day.

Orwell’s eye for what people who were poor and unconsidered looked like, did and said.

Since we know that he’ll die before he’s 50, his reports and letters from the trenches and hospitals in the Spanish Civil War, from his damp and cold cottage, from London in the Blitz, have a strangely charmed effect: we know he’ll survive these, at least, but they still read dangerously. His default tone is ‘I bloody well WILL grumble though nothing will ever come of it’, and he is as hard-working and productive as writer as a man with creeping tuberculosis could ever be. Orwell is honest, plain-speaking (plain-writing?), good-mannered in his business letters and scrupulously restrained in his letters of grumble (as opposed to letters of complaint). These are fabulous volumes of his collected writing, and also include diaries and some scripts from Orwell’s radio broadcasts on the BBC’s Overseas Service to India during the Second World War.

(He was the student representative, Larkin was near retirement, but they seemed to get on.)ĭear brother-in-law, on the evidence of this collection I think you can continue to worship Orwell, but you might want to put on a stern face about his total lack of interest in what women think, say or do. ‘Tell me,’ he said ‘when you’ve finished reading them, if I need to stop hero-worshipping Orwell.’ He then demolished my status at the table as Top Literary Relative with a story about conferring with Philip Larkin before they attended Hull University’s Senate meetings, or something like that. I told my English teacher brother-in-law that I’d bought the four-volume 1968 edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, as edited by Sonia Orwell (volume 3 was unaccountably missing), and he glowed greenly with envy. George Orwell’s Letters, Essays, Journalism

Orwell collected essays