Homage To Catalonia

The Daily Mail, with its tales of red revolution financed by Moscow, was even more wildly wrong than usual.

Later on the famine of matches and candles made life a misery. You do not realize the importance of these things until you lack them.

I remember wondering whether I was frightened, and deciding that I was not.

I found myself in the middle of a political discussion that practically never ended.

’This is not a war,’ he used to say, ’it is a comic opera with an occasional death.’

Everyone who had been in Madrid said that it was completely different there. In Madrid the common danger forced people of almost all kinds into some sense of comradeship. A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

though their principles were rather vague their hatred of privilege and injustice was perfectly genuine.

it produced a shortage of everything and a dismal dull life for everybody,